


Fate or Fiction?

by ShutUpandPull



Category: Castle
Genre: Caskett, Castle Ficathon Winter 2020, F/M, First Meetings, Humor, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:08:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 28,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27608099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShutUpandPull/pseuds/ShutUpandPull
Summary: A Castle Winter Ficathon 2020 entry.A pair of strangers comes to find that nothing is, in fact, very much something. A Caskett first-meeting story.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle
Comments: 41
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> “Do you think the universe fights for souls to be together? Some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences.”

That Saturday morning was a dandy spring morning in New York City, a painting, dreamlike almost to the point of suspicion. Birds were singing, flowers were blooming, the sky was a color of blue so rich it deserved a crayon in its honor, and for a change, there wasn’t a dead body in sight.

It’d been so many weeks and months, Kate had almost forgotten what the warmth of sunshine felt like on her skin, and whether the buzz swirling her brain was born of her reconnection with the too-infrequent sensation or of her and Lanie’s second carafe of mimosas, she didn’t know. What she did know was that coming off two weeks from hell, its touch had her seduced, and with far greater satisfaction than any lover’s in recent memory. Not that there’d been any recent lovers to remember.

“Hey, you still awake over there?” The gentle April Fools’ Day breeze kissed Kate’s lashes and her eyes opened to Lanie staring back. The pair were seated at one of a dozen small tables set up for brunch along the sidewalk outside the East Village restaurant, though not all were occupied. “Were you even listening to a word I said?” her closest friend asked.

“Yes, I was listening.” That was a lie. “I was just--” From a table nearby came a man’s raucous burst of laughter. It hadn’t been the first. Kate half turned, sneered at the intrusion on the complementary lie that was set to follow and lost her thought altogether. “Look at me. Look at me,” she muttered, stabbing at her omelet with her fork.

Lanie snickered. It amused her how bad Kate was at relaxing, at unwinding the knot she always had herself tied so tightly up in.

“Girl, those eggs never did anything to you. You need to chill out or you’re going to give yourself an ulcer.”

“Don’t doctor me, Lanie. I just worked like a hundred hours straight. Is enjoying a meal in peace too much to ask for?”

Absent a request, Lanie picked up the carafe and filled Kate’s glass to the rim. “That’ll help. Drink.” She swallowed a sip from her own. “You know what you really need, don’t you?”

Kate barely looked up from her plate. “Gee, I can’t wait to hear,” she deadpanned, her sarcasm flowing like the champagne.

“You need to get laid.” She hadn’t even made an effort to temper her voice, and earned more than one set of eyes because of it, including that of a shirtless man, strapping and sculpted, who slid them both a glance and a grin as he passed by with his equally fit dog. “Maybe his leash is available.”

The thought had been percolating in Kate’s mind of late, not that she was prepared to admit it. “Maybe you and Mr. Chuckles with the bullhorn over there” --she flicked her head in the direction of the man with the grating laugh-- “should get a table together, preferably far from this one. And no, I don’t, by the way,” she protested half-heartedly. “What I need is for people to stop killing people. It’s friggin’ exhausting.”

Lanie shot her the eyes. “You made your Homicide bed, now you’re lying in it. We’re all exhausted. I’d tell you to transfer, but that’d be a waste of breath. All I’m saying is that a proper toe-curling orgasm would do you a world of good… and not one you pull out of your nightstand.”

Kate’s cheeks flushed like she’d been caught, had some big secret outed. “Okay, can we stop talking about this, please? I definitely don’t need you to _sex_ doctor me.” Chewing on a strawberry, she elbowed the conversation on. “So, now that it’s here, are you going to tell me where we’re going this afternoon?”

Lanie had been taunting her all week. She’d booked the appointment, but refused to say where, mainly because she knew Kate never would’ve voluntarily agreed to it. Not in a million years.

“I think I’ll keep it a secret, but nice try. Surrender, Kate, surrender.”

“What’s wrong?” Kate asked when Lanie’s brow crinkled.

“Laugh guy. He just got up and went inside and I saw his face. I swear I know him from somewhere.”

Kate swallowed another healthy sip of her cocktail. “Maybe you guys go to the same monthly loudmouth meetings.”

“Oh, you are in some kind of a mood.” Lanie shook her head disapprovingly. “I like ‘em more exotic, but he’s pretty hot, more in your ballpark: tall, light eyes, scruff but boyish, like it would tickle in just the right way, if you know what I mean.” She noticed a flutter in Kate’s lashes. “Ooh, girl, yeah, you know. His table’s full of redheads. You don’t have much hair. We could dye it, easy. Hell, with that face, you could walk around with a mane of rainbow-colored clown hair and still get anyone you wanted.”

“No offense, Lanie, but if you’re trying to hit on me, I’m going to need more booze.”

“You should be so lucky.” Lanie stiffened in her chair, but excited, not frightened. “He’s back. He’s back. Nice arms, expensive watch. Gotta like a fine man who likes fine things. Dammit, where do I know him from?”

Kate dropped her napkin on the table, leaned back in her chair and let the sun bath her face. “You realize you’re just blatantly staring at him now, right? No subtlety. He’s obnoxious, Lanie. And he could be a criminal for all you know.”

“That job of yours has made you cynical,” she said without shifting her focus. “If he is a criminal, you’re the one with the cuffs.” She squinted. “Wait a minute. I do know him… not _know_ him, know him, but who he is. He’s that author. You have his books on your shelf.”

Kate whipped her head around, but his was turned the other direction. “Which books?”

“Those cheesy mystery books or whatever. The ones that all have the same name.”

“Derrick Storm?”

“How should I know? You’re the one that’s got a dozen of them. That’s him, though. That’s the guy from the picture. Lord knows, I’ve seen it enough times.”

Kate found herself reaching for her glass again. Richard Castle was hot. She’d met him once a while back, and even then, she’d thought the very thing. He hadn’t been so loud that day.

“So, what, you want me to go ask him for his autograph?”

Lanie still had her attention fixed on him. “I want you to go ask him to take his shirt off,” she replied without a beat.

Kate rolled her eyes and then shut them again, let the sweet buzz swirl and swirl.

**xxxx**

Twenty minutes later, their server approached the table with the check, but it wasn’t the only thing she’d come to deliver. After setting the presenter between the two, she reached into the pocket of the apron tied around her waist and pulled something out.

“Um, I’ve only worked here for a few weeks, and I’ve never been asked to do this before. I hope it’s okay.” She held out a folded piece of paper, which a confused Kate accepted from her without question, if for no other reason than the poor girl seemed like she might burst from nerves. “He said I should smile, so you wouldn’t think it was too weird.”

One of Lanie’s eyebrows curved into a grand arch. “He?” The delight she already felt oozed from the solitary word.

“Yeah, um,” --she turned over her shoulder and came back-- ”that guy over there, with the blue shirt. He stopped me on my way over here. He isn’t even in my section.”

“That’s--”

Kate quickly noted the girl’s name tag, jumped on Lanie’s thought. She didn’t need to look to know which guy in which shirt. The expression on her friend’s face screamed it all. “Thank you, Mackenzie. It’s fine.” She dug out her wallet, handed over her credit card, and Mackenzie went.

“Well, are you going to open it or not?” Kate shrugged, playing, of course. “Girl, you do not want me to come over there. You may have muscles, but you also have shins and I have got two pointy shoes.”

Somehow, Kate kept her curious eyes from wandering his way, but it took every ounce of restraint she could muster. Her fingers fidgeted with the paper, passing it back and forth between them. “Who does this?”

“Does what? You don’t even know what _this_ is because you won’t just open the damn thing.”

Kate was sure everyone on the block heard that one, including him, and her skin flashed instantly warm from embarrassment. “You’re worse than a child, you know that?”

“Oh, boo-hoo. Open.”

With a huff, Kate unfolded the paper, found written on it in notably graceful handwriting: “If no one’s told you yet today that you’re the most exquisite woman they’ve ever seen, that is an unfathomable tragedy. If someone has, I can promise you they don’t mean it half as much as I do. Whatever your name is, most exquisite woman, I believe you may have changed my life forever.”

Signed with only initials, they nonetheless seemed to confirm what had been Lanie’s somewhat questionable identification of the author Kate considered a quiet favorite, and suddenly, she wished Mackenzie hadn’t gone off to close out their bill but to retrieve more alcohol.

“If you are making that up, Katherine Beckett, so help me God,” Lanie cautioned before reaching across the table and swiping the paper from Kate’s hand. Her eyes practically grew to the size of saucers as she read the words for herself. “Okay, you are going to bring me every single one of this man’s books tomorrow. Is he even for real?” She leaned to her right, stole another peek at his table. “Very, very real. And what’re you going to do about it?”

“Do?” Kate said. For the immediate moment, it was what she could manage.

Lanie shook the paper in the air between them. “Kate, you have never played dumb with me, and I’m certainly not going to let you start now. No. That fine man over there wrote this, to you. _This!”_ She dropped the note in front of her. “Are you telling me you aren’t going to do anything? Say anything?”

Mackenzie returned with her card and Kate signed the slip. “I really hope what I did was okay. He was really cute, and he seemed really nice.” Kate began to wonder if the girl had to meet some daily quota on the word _really_. “Anyway,” she went on when Lanie tossed her a smile to try and nudge her on her way, “I really hope you enjoy the weekend. See you next time.”

Kate unclenched her jaw when she walked off, returned her attention to Lanie who clearly wasn’t happy. “What am I supposed to do, Lanie? I don’t even know him. I mean, don’t you think it’s just a little bit creepy?” Funny how she heard her brain say one thing, but an entirely different thing came out of her mouth.

Lanie slid her chair back from the table and stood up. “Doesn’t matter now. He and the redheads left.” She shuffled past, mumbled. “Hello, nightstand.”

Kate puffed her cheeks out and exhaled, folded the paper into her pocket, and followed Lanie out of the restaurant.


	2. Chapter 2

It’d only been a short while, but the paper of Rick’s note was already softening from the fixation of Kate’s fingers. She’d kept her touch close since the restaurant. If asked she couldn’t have explained why. It was just that people rarely surprised her. Maybe her years as a cop had made it so, had made her harder, and what he’d done had caught her so off guard, it was as if she expected it might disappear from her pocket at any moment, like it hadn’t ever really been there at all.

Blessings were sometimes curses in disguise, and that afternoon was a perfect illustration.

Spring’s arrival had wooed the tourist crowds back to the sidewalks after a long and cold city winter, and they were as thick as molasses. Even more so in Times Square, where she and Lanie found themselves a short taxi ride from their brunch spot, with its sound collage of booming billboards and clicking camera shutters, folks hungry to see and be seen. Kate’s already weakened patience battery was draining rapidly, and she could feel its last remaining drops evaporating with every passing minute.

Lanie hooked a right at 40th St and found them some air, some room to breathe. She turned to Kate beside her, saw that her shoulders were all but up at her ears. “Oh, you definitely need more coffee. I’m buying,” she said, and made a beeline for a café up the block.

At the counter inside the local shop, they stood together waiting for their to-go cups of tea and coffee to be prepared and delivered. “You’re thinking about him,” Lanie commented out of thin air, and there was a statement in her tone, not a guess. “You’re thinking about him and it’s pissing you off.”

Unconsciously, Kate’s hand slowly closed around the note. “ _He’s_ pissing me off?” she came back, despite knowing the deaf ears it would fall on. Her best friend was best at many things, including being able to read her like a damn book. Aggravating was only the tip of that iceberg. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Lanie. There’s no reason I should be thinking about him.”

“Mm-hmm. You keep telling yourself that. See how that works out.” She took Kate’s coffee from the barista and passed it on, thanked him for both when he handed over her tea. “Sit or walk?”

They settled at the open table nestled into a nook against the front window. An angular shadow cut the small, round table nearly in half, and Kate chose the seat in the sunshine, immediately began to fiddle with the ceramic coaster bearing the shop’s clever logo that’d been set out for customers’ use.

“Please don’t make this a thing, Lanie. It isn’t one, and it’s not like I’m ever going to see him again--even if I did for whatever reason.”

Lanie crossed one leg over the other, brought her cup to her lips. “What’d you do with the note?” she asked from behind the rim. Kate made a feeble attempt to appear casual, disinterested. “A sexy man like that tells me I’m the most beautiful woman on the planet, I would’ve kept it, too. And you better believe I’d be trying to find a way to thank him for it.”

“First of all, that’s not what he said. Besides, you said he was at a table with a bunch of redheads. I mean, maybe he’s a total jerk. You don’t think my life is complicated enough as it is?”

“If you’re asking me, I think your life could stand a little complication. You like to pretend the cop shop is all you need. That’s how you protect yourself. I get it. And what happened with Will was rough. I get that, too, but not every man is Will, and chasing bad guys in the shadows is never going to make you feel the way I bet that note did.” She recoiled her neck. “Don’t look at me like that. I know you, Kate Beckett. I see you.”

Kate pulled the lid off her cup to help the coffee cool. “I met him once,” she confessed in softer voice--not a shift in volume but in grain. “He’d never remember. I was in a long line of people there to meet him that day, but…” Her thought momentarily disappeared into the memory. “When it was my turn, he told me that if I ever had any secrets, I should be careful, because eyes like mine would never be able to keep them.” She watched Lanie’s mouth fall open and tried to tiptoe back. “It wasn’t that big a deal, Lanie. I’m sure he probably said the same thing to every woman there.”

“You never let yourself have even one,” Lanie noted with a shake of her head. “I don’t know what the hell it’s going to take for you to realize how special you really are. I could tell you until I’m blue in the face and it still wouldn’t get through that gorgeous, thick skull of yours.” She shrugged. “Well, maybe what I’ve got going on today’ll be an eye-opener. A girl can dream,” she added around a sip.

“What does that mean?”

Rather than spill the beans with a dramatic fling, Lanie instead just tipped over the can.

“You have an appointment with a psychic at 3:00 p.m. I told her you wanted to know about your love life.”

Kate swore the room instantly turned a shade of red and began to spin around her. It had to be a nightmare, she thought. A nightmare was the only explanation. At least, she hoped so.

“What the f--? You can’t possibly be serious, Lanie. Tell me you’re kidding.”

“Girl, I am a medical examiner. I deal in deadly serious.” Oh, the eye she was getting. “It can be fun to try new things sometimes, you know, and you need to shake things up while you can still shake ‘em. Geez, it’s one hour of one day, Kate. Live a little. It could turn out to be the best thing that ever happens to you.”

Kate swallowed a gulp of coffee. She hadn’t waited long enough, and the tip of her tongue numbed from the heat of it. “I can’t believe you did this. I could hate you a little.”

“Maybe, but that means you still love me a lot. I’m good with that.”

Kate rolled her eyes. All she’d wanted from the day was a dose of sunshine and a decent omelet.

**xxxx**

“Wait, are you serious? A psychic?” Rick squealed when he unfolded the printout Alexis had stuffed into an envelope that she’d decorated with photos of him for his birthday. “Tell me you aren’t kidding, that this isn’t some cruel April Fools’ joke, because if it is that would be really mean.”

Martha leaned in and kissed the top of her head, whispered “I told you he’d like it” in her ear, and her eyes scrunched with her smile.

“I wasn’t sure what to get you, and then I remembered you mentioning a few times about wanting to go. I read some reviews online, and Gram said I should do it. The woman is supposed to be good, whatever that means.”

“This is a great present, Alexis, the best, just like you. Thank you.” Rick stole her out of Martha’s arms, wrapped his around her in a hug. “I’ve thought about having a psychic make an appearance in one of my books. I just haven’t found the right fit yet. Maybe”--he glanced at the paper for the name--“Lady Raven will have the answer.”

His excitement was endearing, Martha had to admit, more childlike than childish. “Maybe a question or two concerning matters of the heart, Richard? About the ol’ love life, hmm? Not that there’s much life in it,” she tacked on with a tilt of the head that smacked of motherly pity.

“Gram,” Alexis jumped in, “he just fell in love at breakfast, remember?” She was teasing, so gave away her snicker. “Seriously, Dad, you should ask about that instead of the book thing. I’m sure you have a million book ideas. You have zero women.”

Rick took a step back, sneered at his mother. “See what you’ve done? Are you sure it’s such a good idea that you’re living here? Years, and I’m still wondering.”

“Stop it, now you’d be lost without me and you know it. Go, check your calendar, make your appointment with fair Lady Raven. Alexis and I are going to go pick up your… cake.” She sighed dramatically. “Honestly, Richard, robots? I hope the bakery doesn’t ask me how old you are.”

“How old I am or how old you are?” he retorted, unapologetically amused until the daggers from her glare struck. “I’m kidding, Mother. You’ve never looked better than you do this very moment. Also, Transformers are way more than just robots. They’re living machines.”

Alexis stepped in as referee. “At least it’s chocolate, Gram, your favorite.” She linked their arms together. “Try to make your appointment, Dad. We’ll be back.”

As the pair made their exit, Rick bolted giddily into his office.

**xxxx**

Even the font got on her nerves, and she didn’t have many nerves left to get on.

“Lady Raven’s Readings, Lanie?” Kate said mockingly at the name painted in electric pink across the glass door--crookedly, she noticed, which made it all the worse. Below it in small vinyl stickers was the phone number, one of those where some of the numbers were replaced by letters in a way that was intended to be at once witty and helpful. “212-CFUTURE is a number that actually exists and that you called? Is it too late to get your nickel back?”

Lanie’s hand immediately bounced to her hip. “Hey, this isn’t some boardwalk fortune-teller machine. Try $69.99, and you’re going inside.”

“You paid seventy bucks for this? Jesus, Lanie.”

“That’s how good a friend I am, and my girl’s worth it.” She slowly drew her finger up, pointed toward the door. “Open.”

Kate reluctantly pulled, stepped inside. Immediately, she wished she were still wearing her sunglasses. The pink paint that’d been used on the front door had apparently exploded all over everything. She wanted to believe it’d been unintentional, but somehow knew better.

“I bet nobody’s doing much sleeping in here,” Lanie joked. “It’s a choice. I’ll say that.”

“If only I’d had one,” Kate quipped and earned the side-eye.

It was a sliver of a space, narrow, like someone had divided a single room into three, with a small desk, similar to one that might be found in a classroom, against one wall and two chairs suited better to kids than adults against the opposite. Kate took a moment, scanned the room for an occupancy sign, wondering if the two of them already had it filled to maximum and needing the laugh, but the effort wasn’t rewarded.

“Are there chimes somewhere? Do we chant?” Kate, with her back turned to the hallway, didn’t see the woman had already come out of the back and was standing beside the desk. Lanie did, but she let Kate continue to be Kate anyway. “Maybe we have to send Lady some special brainwaves or something. No, wait, she can probably sense we’re here.”

The woman came forward. “I have a camera in the back,” she said with an air so pleasant it had to be artificial. “Welcome to Lady Raven’s. Feel free to call me either or both. You’re Katherine.” She bowed slightly in Kate’s direction. “And you’re the friend I spoke to?”

Lanie nodded, introduced herself.

Because the cop in her was rarely off duty, Kate sized Lady up straight off, didn’t put her a day younger than sixty, and that was about the only thing worth a shred of immediate ease--that her psychic wasn’t some pimply teenager.

Her hair was parted dead center, and though just from a layperson’s eye, a ruler could probably have confirmed that. Beyond its half-inch roots of black, one side was twisted into a taught braid of silver that hung down over her breast, the other side loose, wild, and the purple of spring lilac. It was like looking at two women in one--a hurdle for the senses, to be sure--and yet there was something in the duality Kate understood.

She smiled broadly with lips of deep red and her eyes flashed her age. “Would you care to follow me to your future?” she asked, raising in invitation an arm draped in the blousy sleeve of a floor-length tunic stitched with geometries of gold and silver thread.

The silly phoneword stuck to the front door popped into Kate’s head and she stifled a chuckle. “You want to go first?” she turned over her shoulder and asked Lanie.

“Oh, no, we’re here for you, girl, not me,” she replied with a wicked delight, and lowered onto one of the dwarfish chairs. “I’ll be sitting right here, waiting to hear all about your future.”

“Come, Katherine,” Lady Raven said. “If you enjoy reading, Lanie, please help yourself to a brochure. Tarot sessions are two for one this month.”

Kate narrowed her eyes at her friend. In that moment, she hated her more than a little.


	3. Chapter 3

Though Kate couldn’t call the change of pace an entirely welcome one, the room Lady Raven led her to wasn’t bathed in the pink hue of anti-nausea medication as the entry was, but instead painted floor to ceiling in a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes that left her momentarily unsteady on her feet. And, in fact, if labels were to be applied accurately, it really wasn’t so much a room as it was a closet.

When her hostess invited her to, she shuffled inside, planted her back firmly against the wall as much for balance as out of necessity, which was fortuitous, since it seemed that was the only spot she could’ve parked herself that allowed for the door to be shut. The whole thing screamed for a good round of phone booth humor, Kate figured, and had she been in any mood to laugh, she might’ve been able to come up with some.

“Please, sit where you like, Katherine.”

Somehow, Lady had managed to squeeze two chairs into the space, as well, clearly the brother and sister to those out front, given they basically topped out at the knee. Kate pondered a moment, chose the one that allowed her full view of the door. She had no idea what the hell was about to happen, but it felt like the safer option, if there even was one.

“It’s Kate, actually.” When thrown a flat look, Kate felt herself recoil ever so slightly, then backtracked in bumbling fashion. “Or Katherine’s technically… I guess. Either’s fine.” For the first time the woman’s fingernails captured her attention. They matched her hair--the purple side--and came to sharp points at the ends. Could be employed as weapons, she imagined, which didn’t soothe any uneasiness, her there without the comfort of her own. “Purple’s my favorite color,” she said, simply because the words came out before she could stop them.

Lady slowly reached under the table between them, which, in keeping with the dollhouse-like theme, measured little more than the size of a TV tray, and then the room went dark for three beats before a beam of white light reached down from the corner of the ceiling and struck Kate square in the face.

“You want to know about love, Katherine,” she spoke from the shadows. Kate’s eyes hadn’t yet adjusted from the shock of the beam that, no doubt, could easily have signaled passing planes overhead, so she could hear her but not see her. “Yes, your heart is telling me so.”

“Okay, I know Lanie--”

“Paint,” Lady interjected when Kate attempted to point out she already knew what Lanie had told her when she’d booked the appointment.

“What does paint mean? Paint what?”

Was she talking to herself? Was it a shopping list? Kate had to wonder. One of them sure could’ve used a can or two.

The woman abruptly stood up and sat down again three times in quicker succession than the carriage of her unyoung body might’ve suggested she could, and Kate’s vision had acclimated to the point that she was able to see it happen. She almost wished it hadn’t. It was bizarre and unsettling, almost as if she were a puppet on someone’s string.

“Whispers, Katherine. I hear the whispers.”

Kate didn’t doubt that for a second.

“They tell me of your future. Twelve, they say, the number twelve. Give me your hands!” she exclaimed. Kate flashed to the fingernails and hesitated. “Your hands, Katherine!”

The only thing Kate wanted to do with her hands was to give Lanie the smack she deserved, but she acquiesced, gave them for fear of what hoodoo consequence defiance might bring. Lady Raven’s fingers felt warm around hers in an unwelcome way, bony, yet surprisingly sturdy, their grip possessive.

“I don’t know what this is all about, but those just sound like random words to me.” A deafening silence filled the room and hung for too long to elicit anything but confusion. “Are we--Is that it?”

“Ghosts. Ghosts,” Lady spoke up finally. “Many ghosts.”

Kate’s mind went immediately to her mother who’d been gone for too many years. Since she’d lost her, Kate had never experienced her in that way--in the way the word _ghost_ instinctively called up--nor had she ever subscribed to the possibility, but while it was the only thing she’d heard yet that registered anywhere on her connection meter, it was still a fool’s path she had no intention of starting down, certainly not in her current company.

When the humming began, that was just the last straw.

“Look, Lady--or Raven or both,” she said and yanked her hands free, feeling the prickle of those purple talons when she did, “I’m sure you’re a nice person and whatever, but this is not my thing, any of this. Thank you, but I think I’m done.” Kate pushed her chair back too quickly and slammed right into the wall. “Sorry,” she said and went for the door, hoped to find it unlocked, but imagined she had, at best, a 50/50 shot. 

“Referrals to Lady Raven’s are always appreciated. And remember, Katherine, the eyes don’t lie,” was the last thing Kate heard on her way out.

Halfway down the hall she stopped, looked back over her shoulder, recalling the story of her previous encounter with Richard Castle that she’d shared with Lanie earlier. Doing her best to shake off the association, she continued out to the front room.

“We’re going. Come on.”

Lanie looked at her phone, at the time. “It’s only been like fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen too many,” Kate mumbled, pushed open the door, and walked out. “You’re such an asshole for that,” she said when Lanie caught up to her. “Was that supposed to be helpful?”

“It was supposed to--Can you slow down, please? I don’t have the gazelle legs you do.” Kate stepped to the edge of the sidewalk, out of the pedestrian flow, stood there waiting. “Thank you,” Lanie said with a puff. “Good lord, girl, how does anyone keep up? Okay, a friend from work told me about her, said this woman was dead-on about a bunch of stuff. Whatever, I thought it might be fun, and yeah, maybe helpful. What the hell did she say that you practically ran out of there?”

“Well it wasn’t fun or helpful, Lanie. It was just a bunch of random words from _whispers_ she said she could hear.” Kate didn’t know which had her more bothered: the nonsensical stuff or the comment about the eyes. “On top of that, I’m going to be blinking a white spot for days. She practically blinded me in that cubby she calls a room.”

Lanie didn’t understand the nature of the reference, but it amused her, nonetheless. “So, I guess the paranormal world is a bust. I’ll have to keep searching for the love of your life on my own.”

Kate nudged her along, teased. “Yeah, well, if you find him, maybe let me in on it before you just go ahead and secretly plan the whole wedding for me.”

“Now who’s being the asshole?”

When they again reached the edge of Times Square and the afternoon throngs, Kate took a deep breath in and sighed it into the racket.

**xxxx**

“I almost don’t want to cut into it,” Rick said as he stood over his birthday cake with a knife in hand. “It’s too pretty. It’s like a frosted work of art.”

Beside him, Martha rolled her eyes. “It’s a robot, Richard, not a Renoir. Now, come on, we all have plans tonight that we’d like to get to, and I’d like to get to mine before that poker crew of yours arrives, all right? You know how chatty the judge can be. I don’t understand how it is one human being can be so interested in pigeons. Quite frankly, I find it exhausting.”

“Now you know how Alexis and I feel when you land a new part, Mother.” Knife and all, he jokingly cupped his hands over his ears. “At least I can kick Markway out after a few hours.”

Alexis backhanded him on the arm. “Don’t rope me into this, Dad. I’m already in the doghouse for calling her “Gram” at the bakery loud enough for other people to hear. But, yeah, I told Jessica I’d meet her downstairs for study group in like ten minutes, so can you…”

“Happy Birthday to me,” Rick deadpanned and then sliced a lonely piece off the corner for himself. “Yes, don’t worry, I’ll save you both some.”

They both gave him a peck on the cheek.

“Speaking of landing a part, I’m off to try to do just that,” Martha announced. “Dinner with a producer friend, and a handsome one at that. Good studying, kiddo. Richard, Happy Birthday again, darling, and good betting to you, I suppose. Remember to watch that blinking thing you do. It’s deadly on a wallet. Ta-ta, you two,” she said and headed off.

Rick set down his plate, curled Alexis into a hearty hug she wasn’t prepared for. “Thank you for being so normal,” he gushed. “I don’t know how I’d survive living with two of her.”

“Probably with a lot more gray hair,” Alexis replied humorously, her words muffled by the strength of his squeeze, which he swiftly relinquished.

“ _More?_ ” He dragged his fingers across his temple and around the curve of his ear.

She scooped at the cake’s frosting with her fingertip. “If you dish it out, you have to be able to take it, Dad.” They shared a smile. “So, tomorrow’s studying all day for my exam, but we’re still on for belated pizza out on Monday night, right? My treat?”

Rick nodded, and though she offered every year, he still had no intention of letting her pay. “Yep, still on. Our favorite spot, you and me.”

When she took off to meet her friend and he was alone, he returned to his edible masterpiece. “Renoir. Pff. I bet no one’s ever ordered a Renoir cake,” he uttered with a sneer.

At the same time, in her apartment across town, Kate walked out of her bathroom wrapped in a towel and fell straight onto her bed. Her hair was wet and wild, dripping steadily onto her bare shoulders from its ends, but she couldn’t have cared less. Wiped out from the day and from the two weeks of them that preceded it, her only plan was to crawl beneath the covers and to not move for the rest of the night.

She’d come in after being out with Lanie and stripped for the shower where she stood, left her clothes in a pile at the end of the bed, where they remained. Rolling onto her side, she reached for her jeans, found first their empty front pocket rather than the one she sought.

From the other she slid the note that’d been a preoccupation nearly the entire day. It felt almost romantically worn now, like some old letter from a lover that’d been unfolded, read, and folded again a hundred times. Only it wasn’t that, and he wasn’t that. There was something about it, though. Something.

On her back again, Kate peeled the square of paper open, read its words twice, three times, four. Droplets of water on her skin began to crawl over her shoulders, down her back, but despite their tickle, she let them be.

“Unfathomable tragedy,” she whispered into the room and let her eyes slide shut. She understood too well.

It was her phone that woke her from sleep she hadn’t intended. It’d only been minutes, but her struggle to pull out of it made it seem as though it’d been hours.

“Still mad at me?” Lanie’s text message read.

Rather than type a reply, which in that moment felt a task of too much effort, Kate called. “I’m too tired to be mad,” she said around a yawn. “Is it too late for me to become a glass blower or a baker or something?”

“Honey, this city would go to hell in a handbasket without you and that badge of yours. Go have a shot of vodka, climb into bed, and don’t change out of your pajamas all day tomorrow. Doctor’s orders.”

“Yeah,” Kate said, low and slow. “Aside from my kidnapping to Pepto Land, I had fun today. Thanks.”

“Me too,” Lanie giggled, paused. “So, how many times have you read it since you got home? Did you put it in your nightstand next to--”

“Goodbye, Lanie,” Kate cut in and hung up. After a minute or two, she angled her head back on the bed until she could see the drawer. Vodka wasn’t a half-bad idea, she thought. To start.


	4. Chapter 4

Gray skies and April showers had been forecast for the duration of that Monday and had indeed settled over the city.

Rick opted to take his Ferrari out of the garage for the day, not only to avoid the inevitable battles for taxis that were always a byproduct of lousy weather, but also for convenience. He had several places on his list to hit, and not all of them in proximity, the final stop set to be the appointment he’d managed to score that afternoon with the psychic, courtesy of Alexis’s birthday gift. That hour was going to be the cherry on top of the sundae.

His first couple of errands went smoothly. The rain was steady but light, traffic no worse than expected, and his schedule on track. Then came lunch with his publisher, who also happened to be his ex-wife.

Under most circumstances, the two got along fine. Their divorce hadn’t been acrimonious, they had no children together to engage in a tug-of-war over, and she helped him make money, which he was a big fan of, despite the fact that a nice chunk of it did travel her way. The trouble that day came when he revealed to her his intention to off the main character of his current--and very successful--string of novels, all but assuring its end. She didn’t take the news well.

When he left the restaurant, Rick was in a foul mood. Not as foul as hers, but the smile he’d been wearing up until that point had taken a definite downward turn. That, coupled with the rain that’d intensified from a sprinkle to sheets and the seven cycles he had to sit through at the traffic light at 47th and 8th due to a hydrant issue, had him gripping his beloved Ferrari’s steering wheel like he might otherwise fall off the earth.

The only silver lining was the parking spot he was able to snag. It opened up before him just a couple of blocks from the psychic’s shop like some gift from angels, and though without the umbrella he’d accidentally left at the loft he knew he’d be a soaked mess by the time he got there, he couldn’t have been more excited about what might await him.

Ducking and dodging popped umbrellas left, right, and center, he jogged the entire way, and arrived with just a minute to spare. On his way inside, he had to stop, slide his phone from his pocket. “212-CFUTURE. That is classic,” he chuckled and snapped a photo.

“Whoa!” The pink walls of the front room blasted his eyes, and he wished the weather had warranted sunglasses. “Okay, I’m awake.”

Rick tucked his phone away, gave the place a cursory scan. By eyeballing it alone, he guessed he could probably stretch his arms out and touch the wall on either side. That was how tight a space it was. And it smelled of patchouli, he noted, the biggest surprise there realizing that he even knew what patchouli smelled like.

“You’re Richard,” came a voice out of the silence, followed by a woman to accompany it. “Welcome to Lady Raven’s Readings. I am Lady Raven. You may feel free to call me either or both.”

Excited, fascinated, and somewhat intimidated, Rick approached the desk where she stood. “I’m not psychic, so I was just going to guess it was you,” he replied in search of a laugh. There wasn’t one to be found. “Yes. Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “I’m Richard. Rick. Richard or Rick. Whichever.”

Monday found Lady Raven dressed in a caftan of violet covered by rows of green and yellow triangles of varying size. The garment pooled at her feet like a puddle--perhaps intentional, perhaps simply an ill-purchased size--and it hid nearly every bit of her skin, save for her neck, which, with her dual-colored hair gathered up in a twirled bun, was exposed all the way around.

Like a turtle’s head from a shell, a hand popped out from one of the sleeves, swept around her body, and pointed down the hallway. “Would you care to follow me to your future, Richard?”

“Oh yeah, I definitely would.” He had to fight to restrain his legs or he would’ve run clear over her. “Did you know I was going to say that?”

Strike two. Not even a hint of a laugh.

She let Rick enter the small room at the back first, and he accidentally kicked one of the chairs right into the table. “Whoa,” he said for the second time since he arrived, “it’s cozy in here. Too bad I forgot to wear my cape under my clothes today.”

The Superman humor crashed and burned, too. When she invited him to, he sat, choosing the chair he’d inadvertently abused. He was a tall man of solid build and it barely fit his body. Given his performance with the audience thus far, he kept his mouth shut about it.

“I’ve never been to a psychic before,” he confessed to Lady Raven as she took her seat, settled in. “It’s really… colorful in here.” It wasn’t so much a compliment as his brain explaining aloud the reason his head suddenly felt like it wasn’t on straight. The shapes and colors on the walls were dizzying, and he felt happy to be sitting, especially when she reached under the matchbook of a table and the room went black, just before a beam of light from the ceiling smacked him in the face.

“You want to know about love, Richard.” He could’ve been hearing a recording for all he knew. He couldn’t see an inch in front of his face to know if she was even still in the room. “Your heart has told me so.”

Like it was a buzzing gnat, Rick tried to shoo the light away from his face with his hand. “It’s only telling me I had Indian for lunch, but you’re the expert. If that’s--”

“Paint,” she blurted, and he quirked an eyebrow.

“Should I be writing this down? Am I going to be able to remember everything when I leave?” He was miffed with himself for not thinking of it beforehand. “Paint, Paint, Paint,” he repeated to himself under his breath. “Wait, are we talking, like, a house? Watercolors and an easel? I mean, I suppose I’m something of a painter, though words are my brush.”

“I hear the whispers, Richard.” Rick’s head snapped around in search of voices. When Lady called out “Give me your hands!” he gave them enthusiastically. “The number twelve, they say.” She was squeezing and squeezing, and the fingernails he hadn’t taken notice of earlier were digging into his skin. “Twelve.”

He wanted to pull free but feared the damage it might inflict. “Can I just say I don’t understand what any of this means, but I am fired up about it.”

Suddenly everything was quiet, motionless, and Rick didn’t dare say anything for fear of disrupting the whispers he assumed Lady Raven was listening intently for, but he was bursting with questions and thoughts.

“Ghosts are chasing you, Richard. Many ghosts, but do not be afraid.”

Afraid was, of course, the first thing he felt.

“ _Many?_ Many ghosts? How did I bypass the beginner haunting level and jump straight to advanced? The other side couldn’t start me out gently with like a cold stair or something? You know, ease me into it?”

Silence fell over the room again, that time for what felt like an eternity. Without a peep, she released Rick’s hands, flipped the spotlight off and the overhead light on.

“Thank you, Richard,” she said finally, her red lips turned up in a smile.

“Are we-- Is that it?” He rolled his wrist, glanced at his watch. “It’s only been fifteen minutes.”

She stood first and he followed her lead. “Referrals to Lady Raven’s are always appreciated.” She came around for the door, opened it. “The exit is this way.” Again, she made a grand sweeping gesture with her hand. Rick locked on to the fingernails. They resembled purple spires he’d seen once in a video game.

He stepped past her into the hallway, made no attempt to flatten his pout. “Good thing you reminded me. I might’ve gotten lost,” he sassed. He could already see the glow of pink and squinted in preparation, offered thanks but didn’t really mean it.

“Truth is in the eyes, Richard,” she remarked as he walked off. “Remember.”

After a few steps he stopped, looked back over his shoulder. She was already gone. From the desk on the way out, he grabbed a brochure, not to pass along to anyone in recommendation, but to smack Alexis with at dinner.

**xxxx**

It was an annual tradition for Rick’s birthday, he and Alexis sharing a pie at one of their favorite pizzerias, Big Anthony’s, and as it was nearly every time they stopped in, that evening there wasn’t a customer in sight. As it turned out, Big Anthony’s wasn’t big in success, only in name.

Unfortunately for Rick, his afternoon had gone from bad to worse to worst. Not only had he served as a punching bag for his ex over lunch, but his beloved cherry-red Spider had been keyed while he’d been following that treat up with a stint as a so-called psychic’s sucker. It seemed that while the car he rarely drove had been parked in that gifted spot out on the street, some a-hole had come along and dragged his key near the entire length of the passenger side. The way he saw it, about the only thing left to go wrong was his somehow being poisoned at dinner.

“Big Ricky and Little Red!” the pizzeria’s namesake hollered from the open window to the kitchen when he caught sight of the pair come through the door. “Long time, no see. How the hell are you two doin’?”

Rick willed a half smile into existence, gave a wave, and returned a fresh fib. “Can’t complain, Big T.” Alexis followed with her own greeting, one far cheerier. “How’s the pie business?” he asked, though the answer was plain to see. How the place was still in business after all those years of no customers forever confounded.

“How do you think? Delicious, like always. Take a seat.” He waved off his nephew and lone employee. “I got you. I’m comin’ out, personal.” There were only a handful of tables. They picked one large enough for four because they could. “It’s good to see you two, huh. What’s it gonna be, a couple of root beers and the usual?”

Rick spoke up. “Make it extra cheese, extra sauce tonight, Tony. My kid had a tough exam today. And throw in a round of garlic knots. He seemed happier than usual to see us. How long do you think it’s been since someone walked in here?” he joked to Alexis when the man headed back to the kitchen.

“Dad.” She bunched up the paper covering of her straw and blew it across the table at him, hit him in the chin. “So, come on, how was your appointment with the psychic? What did she say?”

Even the mention of Lady Raven took him back down the few notches he’d been able to climb thanks to the heavenly scent of pizza in the oven.

“You and I are always honest with one another, so let me put it this way: The woman was a nut.” Alexis appeared genuinely crushed. “Sorry to break it to you, Little Red, but regardless of what the reviews you read said, it turns out she was off-planet somewhere. Honestly, it’s not even worth talking about. I’d like to just try and salvage what’s left of this day by enjoying a nice birthday meal with my favorite person.”

His daughter reached across the table and tapped his hand affectionately with hers. “Sorry, Dad. I thought it would be something cool and fun.”

“Don’t apologize. It was a great gift and I love you for it. It just didn’t work out exactly as I’d hoped, that’s all.”

She glanced around his shoulder, eyed the machine standing near the hallway that led out the back. “How about a game while we wait for the food? I wonder if anyone’s beaten your score since we were here last time.”

“Yeah, right,” Rick snickered pompously, hopped up out of his chair. “And you’re on. I just happen to have a couple of quarters burning a hole in my pocket.”

Alexis got there first, waited for the screen to come up showing the list of high scores, and let out a guffaw. “Looks like you’ve been bumped to number two, Dad.”

He stepped in beside her, nudged her with his hip. “Oh, we’ll just see about that, AWM,” he said and dropped one of the quarters into the Pac-Man machine’s slot, kicking off a fresh game. He grabbed the joystick in one hand, with the other hit the button and initiated the jingle that set his chomping, yellow mouth loose.

It was only then he realized. There were ghosts. Ghosts were chasing after his chomping, yellow mouth.


	5. Chapter 5

The call hit Kate's phone just after 6:30 a.m. She was on the scene not thirty minutes later.

Javi met her on the sidewalk out front, lifted the yellow police tape for her to duck under. He’d been the one to make the call; his partner was never one to volunteer himself for the task when the team caught a case early in the morning. Kate didn’t like much of anything if it involved early in the morning, especially a dead body.

“What’ve we got, Espo?” She hadn’t had time to properly tend to her hair after she’d fallen asleep with it still damp the night before, and it was going every way it wasn’t supposed to, despite her hundredth effort to tuck it behind her ears. That wasn’t helping her mood. “ME here?”

His eyes practically exploded with dancing hearts. “Yeah, truck’s in the back. Lanie’s inside. You put in a good word for me yet?”

Kate took the pair of gloves he offered, slipped them on. “I’m not your dating service, Esposito. If you want to ask Lanie out, grow a pair and ask her out.”

Kevin emerged from the building, joined the pair. “Are you coming in?” He looked at Kate, at the chunk of hair jutting from her head at an odd angle, thought on it a second but pressed on without comment. “Morning, Beckett,” he said with a hokey smile. She reacted to neither and he found no solace in Javi. “It’s pretty clean, except for the body.” He pulled open the door to Big Anthony’s and led them both inside.

The owner himself was standing behind the counter with a couple of uniforms when the trio passed. Javi pulled out his pad, read from the notes he’d jotted down when they’d briefly chatted before Kate arrived.

“That was the owner, Anthony Laducci. Run the place for a couple decades, family joint. Place usually opens for business at 10:00 a.m. Came in early this morning to take care of an issue with the oven, found the front door jimmied and the body on the floor just inside the back door. Said he doesn’t recognize him.”

Lanie was crouched next to the victim doing what she did best. She greeted Kate with a smile, which she reciprocated, much to Kevin’s chagrin. “Nice hair,” she teased, as only she could get away with. “A couple of good blows to the head here that I can see. Not much blood.”

Kate scanned the floor around the body. “Weapon?”

“Didn’t find anything on the sweep,” Kevin said. “A restaurant? There’s probably stuff here the perp could’ve used if he didn’t come in with something. The owner didn’t notice anything obvious missing.”

Lanie gave a nod. “I should be able to give you more once I get him back to the lab--traces or fragments of what was used, maybe. Right now, I’d guess time of death between midnight and 3:00 a.m.”

“Ryan, talk to the owner again. Find out who was working last night, if there’s a security system, cameras in-house, and ask him where he was during our prelim window. And make sure we have all of his contact info.”

Kevin walked off and Kate began to wander the scene with Javi in tow. “I’ve never heard of this place, never noticed it. You?”

“Nope. Not surprising. There’s a thousand of ‘em. New ones every day. Everyone thinks they know how to do it better than the next guy. Most don’t and they disappear quick.”

She spotted the arcade game that in her focus she’d somehow missed. “That’s a blast from the past. When was the last time you saw one of those?”

“In my dreams,” Javi replied, drooling with words. “I’d kill for one of those at my place.” Kate narrowed her eyes at his choice of words. “I’m going to go back and hit Lanie up, see if there’s anything else before they take the vic.”

Kate rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you do that, Espo.” Alone, she stepped up to the Pac-Man machine, enjoyed a nostalgic moment. It was chirping and beeping despite being playerless, the screen dancing between a list of high scorers’ initials and mock play, and which of the two suddenly had her more tightly gripping the faux-wood side panels was a toss-up.

“Ghosts,” she whispered, as the game characters continued to disappear into the ranked list of letters and then reappear. They weren’t just any letters, though. Three of the top five sets of initials in the list were the same, and to her, those initials meant something, some _one_ , someone fresh in her mind after the events of just days before.

It couldn’t be him, she thought. It couldn’t. The place was too small. The city was too big.

R.E.C. couldn’t be Richard Edgar Castle.

**xxxx**

“It sure would be nice if they could find whoever did this, Richard.” With empathetic eyes, Martha swiped through the photos of the damaged Ferrari on Rick’s phone. “You know I don’t much care for sports cars, but yours certainly didn’t deserve this. Who would do such a thing?”

Rick polished off the last of his coffee, pulled on his jacket. “I could tell you who, but I don’t think a mother should hear her son using that kind of language.” She handed him back the phone and he tucked it away. “And I’m not holding out much hope of anyone finding anything, Mother. There’s always a camera around when you don’t need one, rarely when you do. Either way, I still need to go down to the station and file a report for the insurance company.”

“Alexis said you two had a nice time last night, by the way. She also mentioned your visit with the great Lady Raven was a bust.”

He’d been up late thinking about it. Thinking about only it. The woman had come off about as odd as odd could be, tossing words at him as though she’d been randomly flipping through the dictionary and pointing blindly. But on the very same day, there were the ghosts, the chasing, and it just seemed impossible that that could be a coincidence. Reconciling the two, though, was something he didn’t yet know how to do.

“Yeah,” he said, again choosing to keep the details to himself, at least for the time being. “I guess it wasn’t a complete waste of time. How many people can say they’ve been inside the world’s smallest room?”

Martha eyed him quizzically.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out, darling. I suppose you never know until you try.” Rick kissed her on the cheek when she leaned in. “I’ll let you get on with your morning. I’m off to get cleaned up myself. I hope you have better luck with the police.”

Rick thanked her and headed for the station.

“Next, please,” the desk sergeant called out from his position behind a wall of plexiglass. Rick had been in line behind four others, and by the time it was his turn, the officer looked as though he’d already had his fill of the public for the day. It was barely 9:30 a.m. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“Just out of curiosity, is this bulletproof?” Rick asked when he stepped up, bent down for the metal speak-thru. That didn’t go over well. “No, I just, I’m not… I’m a writer. I really was just curious.”

“Sir, what is it you need?”

Rick plucked his phone from his pocket, called up one of the photos of his car, and held it up to the partition. “Sorry. I’m here to file a report about damage to my car. Yesterday afternoon, someone--”

“Please step aside, sir,” the officer interjected. “I’ll call someone down. Next, please.”

Rick moved off, found a spot to park himself against the lobby wall. A few minutes later, a uniform was standing in front of him.

“I’m Officer Cole. You’re here to file a report about damage to your automobile, sir? What’s the nature of that damage?” he went on when Rick confirmed.

“I had an appointment nearby yesterday afternoon and had it parked on the street--legally, of course,” he tacked on, but only he found it amusing. “Anyway,” --he lit up his phone-- “it was fine when I went inside, but when I got home, I found this.” The officer began scrolling through the photos. “Someone had keyed the passenger side of my Ferrari, carved a line right through the…” That was the moment he saw Kate pass through the lobby, exchange a nod with his buddy, the desk sergeant, and disappear into a stairwell. “Paint.”

“Sir, your phone?” Cole was attempting to hand it back, but Rick was mentally gone. “ _Sir_.”

Rick’s eyes found his. “Paint,” he repeated, sounding as cuckoo as the woman who’d said the same to him the day before. Somehow, it’d taken an entire night and half a morning for him to connect the very clear dots, and now he was trying to keep it together when all he wanted to do was take off into the stairwell after Kate.

“Yes, I saw the damage to the paint in the photos, sir. We’ll get everything down. Let’s start with your information.”

Rick gave him everything that was needed, waited for his copy of the paperwork, and when they were through, he went straight back to the wall of plexiglass and the speak-thru.

“Is there something else I can help you with?” the man on the other side asked, absent even a hint of feigned interest in doing so.

“Yeah, hi, me again, sorry. That, um, that woman that just--the one with the short brown hair that walked by and you and she knew each other and then she went through that door over there.” He hadn’t actually asked a question, nor had he made a statement of any intelligent construct or substance, which was what the officer’s face clearly read. “Sorry. Again. Does she work here? Is she, like, a policewoman?”

“I’m not going to give you that kind of information, sir. Next,” he called out to a line that, for the moment, didn’t exist.

“Right,” Rick said and backed away with an awkward half wave. Out on the sidewalk, he immediately took out his phone again, and began to search through his list of contacts for someone he knew that might be able to give him that kind of information.

**xxxx**

A few hours later, Kate hit the lobby again on her way out to pay Lanie a visit at the ME’s office. Still on shift, the desk sergeant caught her as she passed, called her over.

“Yeah, Rollins, what’s up?”

“Just FYI. Had a guy in here earlier, saw you come in, asked about you. If you were a cop or whatever. I didn’t give him anything. He was jumpy or screwy or I don’t know what. Thought you should know.”

Kate didn’t have the first idea who it might be. She had three open cases. That morning’s made it four.

“What’d he look like?”

“Tall, over six feet, maybe a buck ninety, brown hair--unshaven but on purpose like they do, you know? Cole took his report.” He scooted his wheeled chair to the far end of the desk, grabbed a stack of paperwork from a tray, and slid back over, started to flip through. “Guy drives a Ferrari. Can you imagine that?” He kept flipping. “A damn Ferrari, in this city. Parked it, goes in somewhere for an appointment, the thing gets all keyed up while he’s there. Here it is. Castle, Richard Castle. Whoever it was did a hell of a number on the paint. It’s gonna cost him a fortune.”

For the second time that day, Kate had to grab onto something when her knees began to buckle, and that time, like the first, was also a double whammy.

“Would you mind making me a copy?” she asked as coolly as she could, and he obliged. She thanked him for the heads-up, folded up the report, and drove with a heavy foot over to Lanie’s office.

“What the hell’s wrong with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Lanie remarked from her chair in the lab. Kate didn’t find the unwitting reference the least bit funny. “For real. What’s up?”

Kate stepped inside, didn’t even grant a fleeting glance to the dead body of her victim on the table.

“Lanie, I’m going to show you something, but please don’t make a big deal about it. I’m already… I don’t know what I am.”

“Okay, now you’re just freaking me out. What is it?” Kate reached into her pocket and pulled out the piece of paper, handed it over without a word. “ _Richard Castle?_ ” She only made it as far as box one. “Your Richard Castle?”

“He was at the precinct, today.”

“For you?”

Kate wrapped her fingers around the back of one of the other chairs. “To log that report. Something with his car. Rollins was working the desk and told me he saw me, that he asked him about me.” She looked up in thought. “He must’ve been there when I came in from the pizzeria.”

Lanie set the paper on her desk. “Let me get this straight. Richard Castle, the famous author-man who wrote you a love note over pancakes, just happens to end up in your precinct three days later asking about you. Kate, your life right now is like a freakin’ romance movie.”

“He wasn’t there to ask about me, Lanie,” she protested. “He was just there. For the report.” No matter how she tried to spin it in her mind toward coincidence, her efforts were failing. “But…”

“ _But_ is right. Girl, believe it or don’t believe it, but the universe is talking and if you ask me, you should be listening.”

Kate was listening, all right. Unfortunately, it was Lady Raven’s voice she was hearing.


	6. Chapter 6

Rick’s success in the literary world had brought to his life much to be thankful for, and he was. He had fine homes and cars, bank accounts with enough zeros to relieve him and those he loved of financial worry for the future, and time, to be there for his daughter whenever she needed him, to stay up or sleep in, to be in New York today or Paris tomorrow.

And then there were the friends.

Seated at his desk Wednesday morning, he had a mug of coffee in one hand and his copy of the police report on the Ferrari in the other. Filled in along the top of the form was the name of the officer who’d written it up on his behalf, as well as his precinct number: One-Two.

Astonished by his failure to make the connection earlier, that the One-Two he’d walked into was, in fact, equal to the 12th precinct and simply the nearest to the scene of the heartless crime perpetrated against his four-wheeled dream, Rick stared at the form agog. He hadn’t chosen that station house. It’d chosen him, or so it appeared, and evidently the quack with fearsome fingernails, Lady Raven, had known a thing or two about it. Or her _whispers_ had, at least, whoever or whatever the hell they were.

First, it’d been the ghosts with the Pac-Man game, then the paint with the car, and now the thing about the number twelve. That his mystery woman from brunch, the woman who hadn’t drifted far from his mind since he’d first seen her, had been there at the very same moment was almost more than his brain could take. He was positively beside himself over it.

When his phone rang, the name “Bobby McCheese” flashed across the screen and Rick jumped on it. That was how he’d amusingly labeled the New York City mayor--and a poker buddy--in his list of contacts.

“What the hell took you so long, McC?” Rick had put in a call to his office the day before, as he stood outside the police station in a haze of shock. “And forget trying to play the “busy” card. That lame leader-of-the-largest-city-in-the-country excuse expired years ago.”

“You think I’m in any rush to call the guy that emptied my pockets dry the other night? Fat chance, pal. You and your stack of cash dropped to the bottom of my list like a rock.”

Rick snickered. “How’s it goin’, Bobby?” 

“I hear too many complaints in a day to add to them, Ricky. Things are good. Sorry about the delayed callback. What do you need?”

It was going to be an odd request and Rick knew it.

“There is a story here, but for now, in the interest of time, I’m going to spare you the details and cut right to the chase. I’m trying to track down a cop. NYPD.” He scrunched up his face. “At least I think she’s a cop. That’s part of the longer version of the story. I know what she looks like and possibly her precinct number. Any chance you can do that mayor thing you do and get me a name? I tried, but it turned out I didn’t know the magic word.”

“Tell me about it. I’ve read your books,” the mayor joked and then settled into a pause. “This might be the weirdest one yet, Ricky. Since I know where you live and I’m still sort of afraid of your mother, I’ll do what I can. Tell me what you know.”

By late that afternoon, Rick had her name, and had become even more smitten than he already was, making the swift decision that even if nothing more came of the information, he’d thieve it for that of a future book character. With its hard syllables it screamed tough as nails, and that alone had his pen aroused.

The woman who’d changed everything he thought he knew about what beautiful meant was Kate Beckett, and in her capacity as a homicide detective, the 12th precinct was her home, so that’s exactly where he began. 

**xxxx**

Kate was back in-house and at her desk after her stop at the ME’s office, and she was grateful to have left there with something concrete to cling to related to the new case, because few things in her life at the moment seemed to make much sense to her at all.

She’d updated the board she’d started to include the added information Lanie had provided, tasked Javi and Kevin with reaching out to Anthony Laducci’s current employees and working to gather any security camera footage in the area that might be of use since the pizzeria didn’t have its own, while she’d begun working the profile of their victim, whose identity they had, thanks to the wallet left in his back pocket.

She answered her desk phone when it rang. “Um, yeah, I’ll be right down,” she told the caller, and confused took the stairs to the lobby. “This is for me?”

“Delivery guy just dropped it off. You’re Kate Beckett. That’s what he said.”

Kate picked up the long, skinny box, noted the sticker pressed onto it from Borough Blooms, and headed back upstairs.

A nosy Javi wandered over first. “What’s that?”

“Is your name Kate Beckett?” He looked at her blankly. “Then it’s none of your business.”

“Hey, Beckett got flowers,” Ryan chimed in, peeking over Javi’s shoulder. “It’s not your birthday,” he added like he deserved a gold star for knowing so. “Who are they from? New boyfriend?”

Javi elbowed him in the ribs.

Kate backed away from her desk with the box. “Don’t you guys have some work to do? Since I’m the one that gave it to you, I’m pretty sure you do,” she said and went off to the break room to open it in peace.

There was a small envelope sitting atop the purple tissue paper inside. The color called to mind Lady Raven’s hair, and it ruffled her that that was her first thought. She slid the card out and read it, moving her lips along with the words without a sound: “How about I make you a deal? I’ll stop having people deliver messages for me if you agree to meet me tomorrow night. Five minutes. Five hours. It’ll be entirely up to you. P.S. I’m not a creep.” Rather than just his initials, Rick had signed it with his full name, and included a phone number.

She set the card on the table, peeled open the wrapping in the box, and removed the bunch of lavender flowers. She’d never seen a rose of that color before, wondered if there was some meaning behind it as she thought she might’ve heard about roses once.

Their earthy sweetness filled her senses as she held them beneath her nose, closed her eyes, inhaled as deliberately as her lungs would allow. Before she knew it, her phone was in her hand, the keypad staring back at her unblinking, like a dare.

There was no world Kate knew where it made sense, where she and Richard Castle somehow existed together--she the cop and he the world-famous author whose books lined her shelf--but like some explorer colliding with an undiscovered land, he’d found her, and it seemed he wasn’t prepared to simply move on. The surprising truth was, neither was she.

“ _Hello?_ ”

Three times he said it before she found her voice and spoke up.

“I’m--It’s Kate… Beckett.” She had no idea what the noise was she heard, but it was Rick nearly catapulting out of his chair when his body flew forward. Then everything went quiet, until she remembered she was the one who’d made the call. “Sorry, this is strange for me. I don’t really know what I’m doing right now.”

“Want to just talk about the weather?” Rick said, and she felt her body ease. “Or baby carrots? I actually have a lot of questions there.”

Kate laughed out of her nose. “The roses are beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. And trust me, you’re not the only one. This is strange for me, too. But… “

“Yeah.” He hadn’t figured it out either and that brought some comfort. “I just got a new case, so I’m not sure what my tomorrow’s going to look like. Maybe I can call or text when I’m done?” Even as she said the words, she couldn’t believe they were coming out of her mouth.

Rick leaned back again in his chair, pushed his fingers through his hair. “Definitely you can call or text when you’re done. Well,” he said when quiet returned, “I hope you catch the bastard who did it, Detective Beckett.”

“Uh-huh,” she chuckled sarcastically. “Did what, exactly?”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea. I’m just a writer and a sucker for happy endings.”

She picked the flowers up off the table, admired them again. “And potentially a stalker,” she teased. Then it was his turn to laugh.

**xxxx**

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Richard,” Martha huffed, “you have been staring at that phone for hours. You’re going to go cross-eyed if you aren’t careful.”

Rick granted her a glance. “Mothers are still telling that lie? In case you’re wondering, I never believed that chocolate milk came from brown cows, either.”

She tossed the dish towel at him from the other side of the counter, hit him square in the face. “What’s so important, kiddo, hmm? Are we waiting for good news or bad news?”

His mind called up Kate’s face. Good didn’t even begin to cover it.

“Do you remember the woman from the restaurant this past weekend, the one that was sitting a few tables over from ours?”

Martha grinned like a cat standing over a fresh bowl of cream. “The woman you fell enamored with? The woman who bewitched you to word?” she chirped, knowing well. “And…?”

“I know who she is. I talked to her yesterday. I’m hoping she wants to talk to me again.”

“Well, isn’t the world one hell of a place. How may I ask did all of this come about?”

Rick’s entire air softened. “I’ve written 26 best sellers, Mother. It’s my job to explain things, but I have no rational explanation for this woman or for how any of this came about.”

“You know, it’s too bad your Lady Raven turned out to be a charlatan. She might’ve been able to offer a bit of insight. How about one of those hotlines? Have you thought of that? With all those best sellers, you can afford $2.99 for the first minute and .99 cents for each additional minute.”

He turned his wrist over, looked at his watch. “Hey, is it funny o’clock already? Nope,” he wisecracked. But it was after 9:00 p.m. and there was still no call from Kate. “I’m going to go watch TV in the office. Tell Alexis I’ll be up to say goodnight in a little while.”

“Hope springs eternal, darling,” Martha reminded him as he sulked off. 

Nearly an hour of flipping channels later, his phone rang. Since they’d first spoken, he’d added her to his list of contacts, typed her in as simply ‘Kate’, like they weren’t the newest of strangers but the oldest of friends. It was her name on the screen.

“So, if there are baby carrots, does that mean there are also toddler carrots?” He hadn’t even said hello. “What about adolescent carrots?”

“When it comes to root vegetables, rutabagas are really my specialty,” Kate offered in retort. “Ask me anything.”

Rick contemplated the paths he could take, opted to counter humor with humor. “Actually, you know I’m more comfortable being the funny one in a relationship. Would you mind taking a step to your left? You’re in my spotlight.” He got up and walked over to the chair behind his desk so he could kick up his feet. “I didn’t think you were going to call. I’m glad you did.”

“I know it’s late. Sorry. I’m still at work. I haven’t had five minutes to do much of anything. I can’t even remember if I’ve eaten today.”

It certainly wasn’t an invitation, but it was an opening, and Rick pounced right through it.

“How about a burger when you’re done? There’s an all-night diner a few blocks from your station. Or… like you said, it’s late,” he continued when she didn’t respond. “I understand if--”

“A burger sounds good, actually. I know that place. Are you just going to read some carrot articles and go to bed?” she said humorously, letting slip the whisper of a giggle. “I’m kidding. Give me 45 minutes? I need to finish up a couple of things and then I can meet you there.”

Elation flooded him.

“I’ll be the one standing in the spotlight,” he said and hung up to get ready.


	7. Chapter 7

Rick had quickly changed his shirt, upgrading from a tee to a button-down which he properly tucked into his jeans, walked through a spritz of old cologne he’d found a bottle of in the cabinet beneath his bathroom sink, and rushed out of the loft to meet Kate.

It’d rained some in the city that afternoon, the fourth day in five that the infamous showers of April had littered the streets with puddles, and the night air in their wake felt sweet on his face as he walked the uncrowded sidewalk toward the diner and the woman he couldn’t explain.

He arrived early by his watch, poked his head inside for a peek just in case, and took up wait outside when he didn’t spot her. A moment of panic had him cupping a hand over his mouth and checking his breath for offense. He’d forgotten the stick of spearmint gum he’d popped before he left home. That he felt nervous about what was to come tickled him. He wasn’t accustomed to that brand of anticipation.

When Kate finally came into view walking up the sidewalk, he had to brace himself against the building for fear of stumbling. As though she carried her own sunlight, she shone brighter than the city lights twinkling in the mirrors of the puddles that lined her way. She was riveting in the sureness of her stride and devastating in her elegance. He’d remembered, yet the picture in his head hardly compared.

“Hi,” she said first.

Her hands were tucked into the pockets of a leather jacket. Black in color and decorated with the hard metal of zippers and snaps, it appeared harsh against the petal-soft skin made visible by the peekaboo cut of her top underneath, but the contradiction had Rick promptly intrigued.

“Hi yourself.” He wanted to press his lips to her cheek but refrained, extended his hand instead. “I’m Rick, and you’re stunning,” he said.

Her eyes broke away after a beat but found their way back. “I’m just Kate.” She reached out and joined her hand with his, and instantly touch became something for her it’d never been. It became terrifying in the impossibility of its power, but she had to simply let the chord reverberate inside of her. They’d only just met. There was nowhere for its song to go.

“How about we head inside and get you that burger, just Kate,” he bantered, hoping for the smile he succeeded in winning.

The late-night diner crowd was thin, and the pair was led to a booth away from the others. Kate sat, slipped off her jacket, while Rick reached into his back pocket, pulled out a single rose, and presented it.

“Eleven plus one makes it an even dozen,” he said and took his place. “Sorry, I had to trim the stem a bit for sneaky pocket transport.”

The flower of lavender belonged with those he’d already sent. He’d withheld it in hopes of that moment, in hopes of being able to deliver it by hand.

_Dozen_ , Kate thought, and wondered if he noticed the startle of it come over her. She hadn’t counted them, and now there were twelve. Lady Raven’s voice played in her head, mingled with his as he spoke.

“The owner of the shop helped me choose the color. She said it supposedly conveys enchantment.” For many reasons, he opted not to share that the woman had also mentioned love at first sight, one being the look on Kate’s face, which he then attempted to ease. “I don’t know much about that stuff. I guess I just thought it was the prettiest.”

She held it beneath her nose a second or two, set it on the table in view. “Purple’s actually my favorite color.” That was yet another… coincidence in what felt like a sea of them. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but do you make a habit of sending flowers to strangers?”

Their server approached the table, pad and pen in hand. She’d probably been there since the day the place opened, her white hair wispy and wild, decades of cigarette smoke practically puffing from her lips in tiny clouds with her every word.

“I’ve seen you kids in here,” she said surely, apropos of nothing. Doris was the name engraved on the scuffed name tag pinned to a uniform that had clearly once been chocolate in color but with years and washings had faded in large patches to khaki. “Never together. I’d remember. What can I get you?”

Rick hitched his brows at Kate, who, without a glance at the menu, ordered a cheeseburger and fries. Having already eaten, he went straight for dessert, for a towering piece of the pie he’d spotted in the glass case at the front counter on the way in, warm with ice cream. Doris pattered off with her pen tucked behind her ear.

“She’d remember,” Rick remarked to amused eyes. “And to answer your question, no, you’re the only stranger I’ve ever sent flowers to.” He folded his fingers on the table, leaned in over them. “Why don’t you feel like a stranger, Kate Beckett?” He relished the sound of her name on his tongue. Those delicious consonants.

“I don’t know,” Kate replied, answering for both. She’d been asking herself the very thing. “Strange,” she murmured, the rose staring back at her.

He settled against the booth’s seafoam-green cushion, and reading her, zagged the conversation. “Do you like being a cop? I’d love to hear the story about how that happened.”

Kate sipped from her glass of water and set it back on the table, took in a slow breath.

“My mother was killed when I was in college. The police never found the person who did it.” Plainly, she shared the most difficult truth of her life, and there was no hesitation, no doubt. “It was really hard on us, me and my dad, for a long time. I just, I had to do something because I was so tired of feeling powerless. Something was becoming a cop, so I could try to find some closure for all three of us. I haven’t yet, but now I know it’s what I was always supposed to be.” She wrapped her hand around the glass again, but only to have something to hold on to. “What about you? Do you like being a writer?”

Rick smiled because she did, despite the enormity of the tragedy she’d confided, which he couldn’t even fathom the effects of, nor the strength she must carry inside.

“Did you know I was a writer, or did you have to look me up?” he asked but swiftly pulled it back. “You know what, never mind. Maybe it’s better for the old Castle pride if I don’t know the answer to that one. I’ll say this, that some days--most days--I enjoy being a writer. Other days, especially recently--and I’m sure you haven’t experienced this doing what you do--it feels, I don’t know, too easy. Not that I’m complaining. It’s a good life. It’s a very good life. It just doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot of challenge in it anymore. Oddly, I miss that.”

Kate understood well. She thrived on challenge. Challenge kept her focused, distracted just enough that she could set aside things she didn’t care to deal with or to face.

Doris returned then to the table, balancing their entire order on one arm. Both were quietly impressed.

“Burger, no onions. Fries. Apple with a side of vanilla. You want something else to drink, honey?” she asked Kate, who declined. “How about some coffee to go with that pile of sugar, handsome? Just brewed some fresh.”

“I can never say no to a beautiful lady, Doris. Sold.” Rick watched her go, his lips curved at one corner. “You can’t write people like that. They’re too real to be imaginary.” His eyes suddenly widened at the plate in front of him. “My god, what is this, an entire bushel per slice?” He dug in gleefully with his spoon, scooped up equal parts pie and ice cream.

“I’ve actually read a couple of your books,” Kate confessed, the casual number a tiny fib. She swallowed down her first bite of food of the day. It tasted like heaven on earth. “They’re not really my type, but I thought they were pretty good.”

Rick’s shoulders slumped. “Not her type _and_ just so-so,” he boohooed to a spoonful of vanilla. “A one-two punch from the cop of my dreams. Ouch. Thanks, Doris,” he said when she dropped his coffee by. They both turned their heads up at the same time. “I’m sorry about your mother, Kate. That’s awful. I can’t imagine.”

“Thanks,” Kate replied. What more was there? “Speaking of types, don’t you prefer redheads?”

What the hell was she doing? she immediately thought.

“Why would you ask that?”

Now she was stuck in it.

“At your table, at brunch.”

“Oh, right. Well, I am quite fond of my mother and my daughter. My ex-wife, it depends on the day. She lives in L.A. and has an annoying habit of showing up unannounced. We all went to breakfast together for my birthday.”

“Happy belated,” Kate offered, noting the nip of gladness inside his explanation brought, though it did spark about a hundred more questions. “Did you make a birthday wish this year?”

Their eyes met.

“Yes, I did, Detective, but we both know it’s bad luck to say what it was. Maybe if it comes true, I’ll tell you. How’s that burger?”

“It’s good, thanks.” She went back to it, took a bite, set her mind loose to play among her own collection of wishes, even though her birthday wasn’t until November.

**xxxx**

“I’m sorry but who is this I’m talking to and why do you have Kate Beckett’s phone? You asked who to do what now?”

A feather could’ve knocked Lanie out of her chair at the lab. That was the level of shock she went into when Kate broke the news.

She and Rick had sat in that booth at the diner and talked until the wee hours of the morning. Such wee hours, in fact, that she didn’t go back to her apartment before work, but rather straight to the precinct, where she caught a couple of hours sleep in the bunk, showered, and changed into a set of spare clothes she kept in her locker for emergencies. 

“It’s just dinner, Lanie. Relax.” Hypocritical, she knew.

“You, inviting a sexy, famous writer-man to your apartment for dinner is something I’m supposed to be relaxed about. Girl, you act like _we_ just met. What the hell happened last night? What aren’t you telling me?”

“I’m not--nothing. We just talked all night, ate pie. That’s all.”

“Mm-hmm. And now he’s coming to your place? This conversation is waking me up better than my coffee, let me tell you.” There was a brief silence. “And will you be having _pie_ tonight?” she inquired, not meaning pie at all.

Kate dropped her hand with the phone in it to her side, cursed herself for beginning the day this way. “Are you twelve?” she snarled, unwittingly bringing Lady Raven into it. She’d never be able to hear that number again and not think of her.

It wasn’t a denial, but Lanie didn’t have the time to press.

“I have a body on my table, so I’m hanging up, but if something happens with you and that man’s body tonight, I expect a full and detailed report.”

“Good-bye, Lanie.”

Kate pulled up the list of text messages saved on her phone, found Rick’s name in the list. He’d sent her a message on his way home--sweet words of thanks--and she read it again before composing a new: “In case my day gets crazy and I forget, how about 8:00 p.m. Chinese?” She included her address, wished him a good Friday.

Assuming he’d still be asleep, she didn’t expect a reply, but he sent one right back. “Like you could ever forget me,” it said, teasing, of course.

A part of her already believed, though, that he might be right.


	8. Chapter 8

Of all days for her to have ended up in a wrestling match with a hopped-up, dumb-ass suspect on the greasy floor of a garage, it just had to be that one.

Kate poked a foot out of the shower, rotated the rectangular bath mat on the floor from horizontal to vertical with her toes, and crossed it like a bridge to the sink. Dripping wet and enveloped in a hanging cloud of steam, she used the flat of her fist to clear a streak through the mirror’s fog, leaned in to examine her latest battle scar.

The hours hadn’t been kind to it, the jagged scrape that now resided along the curve of her left cheek from her too close and too personal rendezvous with the concrete. What had at first resembled little more than an amateurish blush job now suggested an attack by a cheese grater, the skin a bristly collage of reds and purples. In nicest terms, it wasn’t pretty, and there was about zero chance in hell makeup was going to help the cause, not that she had the time to test the theory.

She’d invited Rick to be there at 8:00 p.m., had arrived home from the precinct not thirty minutes before that, and only because Javi had offered to stick around and finish up what had to be finished up, which she now owed him for and hated. A shower of four minutes--her second of the day--had Rick’s arrival at less than ten minutes away, and with it, butterflies all the way up to her throat.

She ran a quick towel over her body, swiped on a coat of mascara in some flimsy attempt at making lemonade out of the rotten lemons life had given her that afternoon, and drew a comb through her wet hair, left it pushed back away from her face. 

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked her tumbled reflection. It was the first time she’d said it aloud, but nowhere near the first time she’d thought it. It had no answer to give. Neither did she.

The knock at her door came after she’d dressed--jeans paired with a nicely fitted black top the evening’s wear--gone to the kitchen to pull out her collection of takeout menus and to assess just how unprepared she was to host company, let alone company of Richard Castle’s sort. As expected, that hadn’t gone well. She’d never felt such embarrassment over her perpetually bare cupboards.

He showed up not with flowers in hand--or pocket--but with a bottle of wine, scruff she was delighted still hadn’t met with a razor, and a broad, boyish smile. And as if that trifecta weren’t enough to pluck her string, he wore t-shirt of steel blue that looked as though it’d been sewn on him that very evening, one that made his eyes and hidden parts of her anatomy sing like an opera crescendo. The second Kate saw him she knew she was in trouble, despite having armed as best she could her already feeble defenses.

“Hi.” There was a rumble in his voice. It was new, and seductive, intended or not. “Oh, please tell me you put the person who did that in a choke hold and called them a scumbag,” he implored referring to her conspicuous wound. “Even if the truth is you tripped over the cat.”

She had to smile, just a little. “Scumbag? Please tell _me_ you’ll never write cop books,” she teased. “And sorry, I don’t have a cat. Come in.” She moved aside, explained. “I had playtime with a suspect today. He didn’t like my toys much. I look awful, I know.”

Rick took a few steps inside, stopped, waited for her to catch up. “I wasn’t sure if you liked red,” he told her, presenting the bottle. “Figured I’d take a shot. Speaking of, maybe I should point out, you know, in case you and your toys get any ideas, I prefer my shots in a glass.” In the air, he drew a circle around his face with his finger. “Don’t want to damage the art.”

Hot. Romantic. Charming. Funny. So much trouble.

“Also, Detective, awful is the last thing you could ever look. You can trust me on that. I’m a very honest man.”

“That’s what all the biggest liars say,” she quipped.

“Wow. Cynical, table for one.”

Kate glanced down at her hand. “It’s not such a bad table now. It’s got fancy wine. This is great, thank you. Do you want to sit? I have some menus I pulled out.”

Rick settled on the couch, watched her as she worked on the bottle in the kitchen, mesmerized by the simple elegance of her every move. Nothing about her was like any other woman. None of his words were enough to explain how or why. He knew only that felt her as surely as he felt the rise and fall of his chest with breath, equally not by his any deliberate act but by some grander imperative.

“I like your place,” he stated with admirable restraint, rather than drown her in the deluge of worshipful adjectives the geometry of her face evoked. “It feels… lived in.” She slanted him a look. “I just mean it’s comfortable. Not that I don’t enjoy my own, but there are rooms in my loft and my beach house that I swear I’ve only ever walked through to get somewhere else.” He immediately squeezed his eyes shut. “Yes, I’m suddenly painfully aware of how braggy that sounded. Backspace, backspace, backspace.”

With the menus tucked beneath her elbow, Kate wandered over with a glass for each of them, sat but left a cushion between. “Cheers,” she said and sipped. “Are you ever not writing? Can you turn off that part of your brain and just be Rick?”

“Can you? Do you ever leave Detective Beckett at the station?” He pondered for a moment in her silence. “I think over time I’ve learned how to turn it down. Maybe not off, but down. I guess that’s what loving something does. It’s a song that’s always playing.”

“Yeah,” she concurred thoughtfully.

“You know, I should also probably mention that if at any point tonight I seem distracted or like I’m somewhere else, it’s absolutely not because I’m bored or disinterested. It’s because you smell so good it’s making me kind of dizzy.”

Kate blushed everywhere.

When her eyes found his lips, her every ounce of sense nearly vanished into thin air. She’d insisted to Lanie that she didn’t need sex, but sitting there beside Richard Castle whose books she’d taken to bed with her on countless nights, who was talking of love as endless music and gazing at her with such rapt attention, sure had her wanting it and on the verge of doing something wildly unwise.

She clutched the stack of menus in her lap like she was bobbing in rough seas and they were a life preserver. “Maybe we should order something to eat.” To her ear, it came off like she was a nurse suggesting a plan of attack to combat a patient’s drop in blood sugar, wooden to the utmost. “We don’t have to have Chinese. If you want something else, that’s… What?”

Rick’s arm was outstretched along the crest of the cushion between them, his hand so close she could make out the arcing moons of his fingernails, hear the texture of the fabric when his thumb began to unconsciously pet it.

“I’m staring. I know,” he confessed. “I told myself twice before you opened the door not to stare.” When Kate swallowed, she heard the exaggerated gulp of a cartoon character, hoped he didn’t. “I guess that makes me impolite and a bad listener. With you I can’t seem to help myself, Kate Beckett.”

Apparently, she couldn’t help herself, either.

Shoving the menus to the floor, Kate flew toward him, her mouth hotly capturing his. Caught understandably off guard, Rick considered pulling back to voice it, but the fist she had clenched around the hair at his neck swiftly countered and dispelled the impulse, rendering him speechless.

In short order, the number of couch cushions between them decreased from one to zero, when he hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her across his lap. His professed dizziness escalated to something out of an Alfred Hitchcock film with her proximity, and no sensation had ever made him feel at once so unsteady and so lucid as his hands on her body and hers on his.

“Castle,” she sighed against his lips, not aware of its origin, only that turning it loose delivered an arresting charge.

Rick’s fingers floated beneath the hem of her top and traveled up her back. “I like it better when you say it,” he grinned. “What else?” His mouth dipped to her neck, closed around her skin in a playful bite.

The else she poured into his ear in a slow, dulcet whisper, and obliging the request he stood, hitched her up around his waist and followed her directions to the bedroom.

**xxxx**

“Wow,” Rick panted from the pillow beside her. “Am I still alive?”

He was naked on his back, exposed, Kate likewise, her long and lean limbs draped across his body after having tumbled off him. The lamp beside the bed was turned on a single click of three, the sheet and comforter dangling precariously over the side of the mattress, and she giggled amidst his huffs and puffs at the question, not only because of its humorous delivery, but because it could easily have been she who asked. What it was they’d just done together had left her equally and blissfully uncertain.

“I don’t know,” Kate replied wickedly. “Let’s find out.” She slid a hand lower, found him beneath her thigh, and tickled a fingertip along his length. “Did you feel that?”

His every muscle jerked in response to her touch. “I want to say no so you’ll keep doing it, but since I clearly am alive and want to keep it that way, I’ll just congratulate you on a fine experiment.” Letting his head fall her direction, he smirked. “So, that thing you whispered in my ear out on the couch. Was it performed to the detective’s liking?”

Kate inched closer until her lips were nearly touching his. “If you couldn’t tell, you really are a bad listener.”

“Again,” he said and stole a kiss, “with you trying to be the funny one.” With an arm curled around her, he nudged her in closer. “That was nice, you and me. I hope it’s okay to say that. I know it didn’t come out as poetry, but it sure went in that way.”

That in and of itself was poetry, she thought.

“It is. It was nice.” Her words trailed off. “I wasn’t expecting it.”

“To be nice?” Rick blurted defensively.

“To happen,” she clarified with a flick of his chest. “I don’t understand how any of this happened, how we even met. It doesn’t even seem like our lives should have paths that ever cross.”

He shifted his position, rolled onto his side and up onto his elbow. “What about fate? You don’t believe some things are meant to happen? That some people are just meant to meet each other?”

Kate flopped an arm over her eyes when the remembrance of electric-pink walls and weapon-like fingernails flashed before them. “I believe that if a couple of stoners break into a pizzeria on a Monday night looking to stroll out the front door with some arcade machine on their backs, and one of them ends up bashed in a head with a napkin dispenser, odds are that stupidity got him, not fate.”

That may have been true, but it certainly didn’t explain how it was she found herself stretched out naked in her bed with Richard Castle.

Rick chuckled. “A napkin dispenser? Is that for real?”

“Welcome to the glamorous life of a homicide cop, where few things are as you see them on TV. It was my newest case. We closed it today.”

Something clicked.

“Monday night,” he thought aloud after a long moment. “Wait, an arcade machine? What pizzeria?”

“Some mom-and-pop on 49th. Big Anthony’s. Why?” When he didn’t answer, she pulled her arm away, noticed how stunned he was. “What’s wrong?”

“My birthday dinner with my daughter. Kate, I was at Big Anthony’s on Monday night.”


	9. Chapter 9

Kate pulled her robe from the hook on the back of the bathroom door and slipped her arms into the sleeves, left the ends of its sash hanging at her sides as she stepped up to the sink.

_It was him_ looped clamorously in her brain, and each punch of the improbability struck mightier than the last. She’d seen the initials memorialized on the game’s screen inside that pizzeria Tuesday morning, wondered--albeit doubtfully--if they could be his, but now she knew for sure, straight from the mouth that’d just transported her body to some unfamiliar height. R.E.C. was Richard Edgar Castle, a man she didn’t know less than a week before as more than a scribble inside a book cover and a curious observation, but who’d since crashed into her life and begun to turn it upside down.

Twisting only the right knob, she let the cold water fill her cupped hands and splashed it over her face. “Dammit,” she hissed when she carelessly dragged her fingers across the raw wound on her cheek. Reaching for the hand towel that hung beside the sink, she patted her eyes dry, opened them to find Rick’s face in the mirror over her shoulder.

“Are you okay?” He reached around her for the towel, turned her body by the hips to face his, gently dabbed the tumbling droplets from her face. “Did I upset you?” She’d left the bed and the room with barely a word. His revelation had sucked the air from her lungs.

He'd put on his boxers but nothing more. His skin was the color of warm and his hair still stood this way and that from the occupation of her avid fingers. He looked like no dream she’d ever had.

Kate leaned back against the curve of the sink, wrapped her hands around its edge. “No. I’m sorry. It’s just, this isn’t me. I don’t do this. All these things have been happening and I don’t understand why, _how_.”

Rick tossed the towel aside, and with his thumb swept away a stray bead from the ridge of her collarbone. “What things?” Even as he spoke, his mind raced with all the things that’d happened. Lady Raven’s every seemingly insignificant word had come to pass, and in wondrous fashion. She’d pointed him the way of love. Standing there in that moment with Kate, he believed that. “Come here,” he said and moved in for her when she gave no response.

Absent objection, he remained there with his arms around her, his skin pressed against hers. He could have remained there for hours, days, forever. “Are you actually here? Are you real?” Her lips tickled his shoulder when they finally moved.

He angled his head, kissed her neck, pulled back to meet her eye. “Did you feel that?” Moments ago, she’d asked the very thing. “You’re the dream here, not me.” She smiled softly. “Hey, what do you say we continue this conversation over some noodles? Detective, have you ever eaten lo mein the way it was meant to be eaten?”

“How is that exactly?” she asked dubiously.

“I’m so glad you asked. That would be straight out of the carton, with chopsticks, in the company of a sexy, world-famous novelist who thinks you’re the most incredible woman he’s ever met… also you’re both naked.”

Kate bit at her lip, tugged it lightly between her teeth, and sent him to fetch the menus.

**xxxx**

Rick reached out, lightly trailed his fingers across Kate’s heart and down along the exposed skin between her breasts, following the vee of the floral robe of satin that hung loosely there. If only to heighten the anticipation of what was sure to follow, they’d traded naked dining for that with a smidgen of modesty, remaining in but one article of clothing apiece, and that decision--unspoken though it’d been--was indeed quietly serving that end well.

“I love this part,” he remarked admiringly, his eyes locked with hers as he melted her with the compliment. “Don’t get me wrong. I love all the parts, but I especially love this one.”

“I bet you say that to all the cops,” Kate kidded to a chuckle.

“Yeah, you should’ve seen how Officer Cole blushed when I laid it on him at the station the other day.”

They were sitting beside one another on the floor in front of her couch with pillows beneath them, Rick’s legs outstretched, Kate’s tucked up to the side. At some point, she’d come around to face him and hadn’t shifted back. The pleasure of the view had been too tempting to let pass.

Some of them empty and some not, cartons from their carpet feast were lined up between them, but the pair had long been finished with food, and for the better part of an hour had been enjoying conversation about simple, uncomplicated things and each other’s company.

They didn’t know it, but simple and uncomplicated was about to change.

“Have you ever thought that something was nothing but then nothing turned out to be everything?”

Kate crooked her head, narrowed her eyes in confusion. “Is that… Are you riddling me? Are you expecting me to be able to figure out what that means after all the food I just ate?”

“It’s not a riddle. I’m asking because it’s happening to me, with you.” Rick settled his hand on her knee, began to caress it with his thumb. “Kate, I had a very bizarre experience this past Monday, and I’d basically written it off as a waste of time the minute I’d walked out, but being here with you now, I can’t not believe it. It’s exactly like you said about things happening that you don’t understand.”

Her heart thumped in her chest when his words wrapped themselves around it and squeezed.

“Believe what? What’re you talking about?”

“Okay, I’m sure this is going to sound ridiculous, but my birthday present from my daughter this year was a visit to see a psychic. I know,” he threw in preemptively, “but in my defense, I’ve been considering it for a while as research for a potential character in one of my books--mostly. Anyway, I went to this shop Alexis found and I met this woman with crazy-colored hair and fingernails like knives and she basically shouted words that meant nothing at me for fifteen minutes before she kicked me out.”

Kate’s body had tensed to the point that she had to force her jaw to unlock so she could get out the single word she was still trying to process.

“Psychic?”

“Believe me, when I left there, I thought she was anything but. I mean _Lady Raven_? That should’ve tipped me off right away. That was her name. I could’ve strangled Alexis. But then…”

Kate could feel her skin draining of color, becoming more and more pale, starting with her toes and working all the way up. And then he kept talking.

“These things she said, Kate, the words that meant nothing to me at the time, they started to make sense, and somehow they ended up leading me to you--the paint getting scratched on my car, and then filing the report about it at the 12th precinct where it turns out you work. She specifically told me the number twelve. And now tonight I find out that your new case was at Big Anthony’s? I think Alexis and I are the only two customers that place has had in years. And it has the Pac-Man game, with the ghosts! Lady Raven said ghosts were chasing me. How could I not think the universe is telling me that being here with you is exactly where I’m supposed to be?”

She didn’t know how, but Kate found the strength to stand up and then the voice to speak. “I think you should go, Rick. I can’t do this. I need to--I need you to leave.”

He got up, too, wanted to reach for her, but quickly understood from her posture that he shouldn’t. “Can’t do what? I’m sorry. Can you tell me what just happened?” She backed away. “If you want me to leave, I’ll leave, but I don’t want to leave like this, not after the night we’ve had.”

“We don’t have anything,” she snapped. “We don’t even know each other.”

His chin dropped for a few beats before he looked up again. “Right. So, I guess nothing turned out to be nothing then.”

He went off to the bedroom and dressed, left the apartment without another word, and when the door closed behind him, the immediate ache she felt inside was far from nothing.

**xxxx**

He’d called. He’d texted. Kate had expected neither, responded to none.

It wasn’t because she hadn’t wanted to. She had. The want had eaten at her all week. Every time his name had popped up on her phone--it’d been many--her mind had flashed to his smile, to the way his brilliant blue eyes had devoured her naked body, to that intoxicating rumble in his voice, and it’d taken every bit of self-restraint for her to leave it be. Want was a problem only because she had so much of it. Unfortunately, the same was true of fear.

“I just brought out the whole damn bottle if you’re going to be mopey like this all night,” Lanie announced, appearing from the kitchen with it tucked under her arm and a glass with a generous pour in each hand.

Like Rick, Kate hadn’t talked to her all week either, but had stopped at her place after work Thursday night on the way home. Of course, as always, her best friend knew something was up. Radio silence wasn’t their norm, even in their most hectic of weeks.

“I’m not mopey, I’m tired. It’s been a long day, okay?”

“What, like I sat around all day in my jammies and ate bonbons? Every day’s a long day, for everyone. Talk about tired. That excuse is tired.” She swallowed down a good sip of pinot noir. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on, why you’ve been avoiding me, or am I going to have to guess? Neither of us’ll enjoy that game, I can promise you that.”

Kate hadn’t told her about Rick. Any of it. The last thing Lanie had heard was that he’d been invited to dinner. That felt like a lifetime ago.

Kate fiddled with the base of her glass, spinning it back and forth, shoved a hand through her hair. “Lanie, have you ever been sure about something there’s no reason you should be sure about?” Lanie eyed her with the puzzlement the cryptic inquiry warranted, which Kate noted. “I mean, have you ever just known something somehow, but you can’t explain why you know it?”

“Okay, first, I’m glad I brought the bottle. And second, what’re we talking about here? You’ve said the same thing twice and I still don’t get it. Spit it out. Use words a kid would understand.”

With an inhale, Kate tore off the Band-Aid. “Rick. I slept with Rick.”

“Rick who?”

“Rick, the mailman. What do you mean ‘Rick who?’ Rick Castle.”

Lanie held up a single finger, chugged her glass nearly dry. “Yeah, I knew. It’s just fun watching a control freak lose it for a sec,” she smirked around a heavy breath. “So, sex with the writer-man. What happened to just dinner? And more importantly, you waited almost a _week_ to spill this? Girl, what in the--”

“There’s more. There’s a lot more.”

“Oh, there better be a lot more. When? Where? How? I’ve seen the man. I definitely know why.” That curled Kate’s lip. “Was his bedtime story as good as his Scooby-Doo mysteries?”

Kate slid her a look. “You know, sometimes I really do wonder why I like you so much.” Lanie batted her lashes. “It was that night, the night he came over for dinner. We just ended up eating dinner a little later than I thought we would. And yes, because I know you’ll never shut up about it unless I say it, it was good. It was… very good.”

Lanie poured some more wine in her glass to wash the news down with. “All of this sounds good, very good. What’s the rest? And what exactly are you sure you’re not sure about or not sure you’re sure about or whatever that mess was?”

“You won’t even believe it when I tell you.” Kate leaned back in her chair, shook her head. Even after a week, it was still beyond her comprehension. “We were sitting there after, Lanie, just talking about nothing, and he started telling me about the birthday gift his daughter just got for him, about how his wanting to go was mostly about book research and a new character maybe and how he thought it was all BS at first--”

“Are you writing a book here? Lord in heaven, woman, please.”

“Rick was at Lady Raven’s, Lanie. A couple of days after we were there, he was there, and everything she told me was the exact same stuff she told him. Every word. And now…”

Lanie just burst into laughter.


	10. Chapter 10

Kate went for her wine and tipped some back, held the glass steady at her lips until Lanie’s fit of laughter eventually died out. It went on for several sips.

“Now that made my week,” Lanie snorted. “Definitely worth the wait. I guess old Madame Pink Walls knows a thing or two about love after all. I’ll take that ‘thank you’ whenever.”

“Maybe slow down with the pinot, okay, Lanie? Christ, no one said anything about love. It’s just…”

She could see how much Kate was struggling with it, hear the battle between her heart and her mind in the tone of her words, and that didn’t come as any surprise. She’d been her closest friend and confidant for years, had watched a man or two come and go from her life, possessed a deeper appreciation than most of how the death of her mother had forged the armor she still wore and rarely removed.

That a thing of such magnitude--love or otherwise--had now touched her life and had done so seemingly well beyond her control would of course have her spinning. Clinging to control was how Kate Beckett survived most days.

“What is it _just_? He’s different,” Lanie continued into the weighty silence. “You know he is and it’s freaking you out.”

“But that’s crazy, right? It doesn’t make any sense. I barely even know him.”

Lanie smirked, blew out a puff of air. “Yeah, you saw that fine man bare,” she teased. “And if you ask me, the psychic thing is the crazier part. It will make for one hell of a how-we-met story, though. Besides, when has love ever had anything to do with sense, Kate?” Her hand went right up. “Love. Not love. Whatever. Look, regardless of what your buddy Lady Raven told you--either of you--or how Rick ended up in your life or your bed, you feel something for him and, obviously, he feels something for you.”

Kate let her head dip back against the chair, pressed her fingers against her eyes.

“This is all your fault, you know. I didn’t even want to go to stupid brunch.”

“Hey, don’t you get mean now.” Lanie clicked her tongue, poured her some more wine. “Things happen to people, Kate. Sometimes they’re shitty things. You and I see that all the time. Sometimes they’re incredible things. You want me to explain to you why you have a connection to this guy like it’s some autopsy report I’m writing up. I can’t do that. I don’t have a magic pen. I can’t dissect something you feel. I can only tell you I get why it’s hard for you that you feel it, and that I think you owe it to yourself to find out what this thing is.”

Kate pulled her hands away from her face and dropped them into her lap, cracked one eye. “Esposito’s hot for you, by the way, in case all the drool running down his chin every time he sees you hasn’t tipped you off. He’s been hounding me to give you his number for months.”

“Some avalanche this is turning out to be. I’m finding out there’s a whole lotta shit you don’t tell me.” She grinned wickedly. “Well, you haven’t said anything, so I guess Javi didn’t drop this one on you. He’s coming to my thing on Saturday night… as my date. See what happens when you avoid me for a week? You miss stuff, too,” she explained on Kate’s look before bringing her glass to her lips. “And guess who just bought herself a new mattress?”

“Oh my god, stop right there. I beg of you, whatever you do, please do not share any of my partner’s sex secrets with me or I will never have a normal day at work ever again.”

The two shared a laugh.

“Okay, back to you. What are you going to do about this man?” Lanie nudged. “Have you seen him again since you two did the dance?”

Kate’s forehead crinkled at the pick of euphemisms. “No. I haven’t even talked to him.” Like a switch, Lanie’s expression flipped from curiosity to something resembling offense. “Relax. _I_ haven’t talked to him. He’s tried to talk to me. I didn’t know what the hell to say, Lanie. We had this night and then I practically shoved him out the door and threw his clothes out after him.”

“Well, a hello might work for starters. Girl, you think you always have to put on this tough-as-nails act-- like nothing bothers you, like you don’t need anything or anybody. That is some prime BS, and we both know it. You don’t need to have all the answers on the first night. How could you possibly? Like you said, you only just met. But, Kate, what if? You must ask that all the time with your cases. Why can’t you give yourself permission to ask that question with love?”

Her eyes glistening with unshed tears, Kate got up and excused herself to the restroom, leaving her phone behind. Once Lanie heard the click of the door, she did what any meddling but well-meaning best friend who’d consumed too much wine too quickly would do, which was to pull up Kate’s contact list and copy Richard Castle’s phone number into her own.

**xxxx**

He was at his laptop in his office late the next morning, banging away at what was to be the final episode of Derrick Storm’s literary saga in defiance of how much his ex-wife-cum-publisher had unsparingly spent the last two weeks slamming him for it. Not even an hour before, she’d left him yet another voicemail, declaring the decision “moronic” and insisting everything awful short of the sky falling would come of it. It was no wonder he’d begun declining to answer when her name popped up.

He could only give thanks they were no longer living under the same roof.

The cold truth of it was that Rick didn’t care, about the calls or the messages or the boo-hooing. Moronic or not--and he left room for the possibility--the scales of work and fun had some time ago started to tip in favor of the former, and with it his interest. The craving for something new had all but reached the boiling point.

When his phone rang for the second time, he instantly hoped it was Kate, just as he had each ring and buzz all week. Despite the number of times he’d reached out to her to no response, she remained there at the forefront of his mind, of his fantasy. As the patter of his heart suggested, her residency seemed unlikely to expire anytime soon.

“Hello?” he answered to the number he didn’t recognize.

“Hi, this is Rick Castle, right?” She went on when he confirmed. “I got your number out of Kate’s phone--Kate Beckett. This is Lanie… Parish. I’m her--”

Before she could manage out the rest of the introduction, Rick jumped in. “Is something wrong? Is Kate okay?” His unreserved concern endeared him to her immediately. It confirmed there was something deeper between the two, and not just from Kate’s side.

“She’s fine. Nothing’s wrong,” she reassured. “You can breathe. I was just going to tell you I’m her best friend, so you didn’t think some crazy person got into her phone and just started calling people’s numbers.”

Rick did as she advised and exhaled a long-drawn breath to calm himself. “Hello, not-some-crazy-person Lanie, and yes, I think it’s probably obvious now I am Rick Castle. To what do I owe the pleasure this morning?”

His voice was just as sexy as the package it came wrapped up in. She couldn’t help but notice.

“Okay, look, one thing about me is that I’m a straight shooter. I don’t see a lot of reason to waste time tiptoeing around stuff. I work with dead bodies all day, and I know what a capital B time can be. I also know a thing or two about Kate that most other people don’t. She’s trying to make sense of what happened the other night. She really is, and I know she wouldn’t be doing that if she didn’t think there was something special about you.”

After a long moment, he returned one of the grandest understatements of his life. “I think she’s special, too.”

“You’re damn right she is, so this is what I’m doing about it. I’m having a small thing at my apartment tomorrow night. It’s not a big deal, it’s casual, just a few friends for dinner and drinks. Kate’s going to be there. I thought it might be that you could be there, too, and she may not forgive me for this for a long time, but I’m taking the chance on you. I want her to be happy. That’s the most important thing for me.”

“I can be,” Rick said gently. “I can definitely be there. Thank you for this, Lanie. All I want is a chance to talk to her.”

Before he ended the call, he asked her to send him a text message with the time and her address.

**xxxx**

Martha barely got a foot into Rick’s office before he came stomping out of his bedroom, phone to his ear, jacket it hand.

“I’m not going to keep having this argument with you, Gina. Read what I sent or don’t. I’ve got plans and I’m hanging up.” And he did.

“My, my, what was that all about?” Martha, who’d frozen in place, resumed her path inside. “Honest to god, kiddo, your relationships with your ex-wives make me about as dizzy as that music Alexis listens to. What’s got your persnickety publisher’s hair in a twist this time?”

Rick was plainly agitated, but that only scratched the surface of what he was. Agitated was merely next in the line of temporary numbing balms he’d applied to his nerves across that afternoon. He’d also given frustrated, irritated, critical, and bored a go. Coincidentally--as well as unfortunately--they’d all stepped in to offer help while he’d been working on a chapter for the book.

“It’s nothing, Mother,” he snarled and dropped his phone into one of the jacket’s pockets. “She’s been up my ass since I told her about ending Storm.”

She shot him a motherly scowl. “How charming, Richard, thank you for that. The price one pays for raising such an eloquent son,” she muttered tartly. “You look nice.” He’d kept it within the realm of casual: dark jeans, black button-down, sport coat. “Where are we off to this evening? Someplace to take your mind off the business at hand, I hope.”

He finally stopped fidgeting, gave her his attention. “Thank you, Mother,” he said acknowledging the compliment. “And I’m sorry. I’m just…” With too much to explain and too little time, he left it. “I’m headed to a friend of a friend’s place for a dinner party. It was a last-minute invitation.”

“All right, well, good for you. I’m in for the night, I’m afraid. Alexis invited Jessica to stay over. They’re upstairs in her room with that _music_.” She straightened his lapel when he pulled on his jacket, cupped his cheek with a tender hand. “I’m proud of you for doing what you know is best for you. If Derrick Storm isn’t what makes you happy anymore, so be it. Persnickety publishers be damned!”

Rick drew his hands up. “Please, my virgin ears, Mother.”

“Wise guy,” she chuckled. “Now is that cologne I smell? Does this dinner party perhaps involve a date? Have you finally heard--” She cut herself off when his eyes answered the question he already knew would follow. “Go on then, get going,” she said instead and followed him out of the office. “You enjoy yourself, darling. I’m sure I’ll be asleep when you get home, so I’ll see you in the morning.”

When he got to the door, he turned back over his shoulder, left her with the most convincing smile he had in him.


	11. Chapter 11

Without a doubt, Rick considered himself a people person, comfortable interacting with and being at ease among groups of friends and strangers alike, but the way his insides were rolling as he pressed a finger to the buzzer at Lanie’s apartment door had him feeling far from at ease.

“Lanie?” he presumed incorrectly when a woman opened for him. He couldn’t have known, of course. Though he’d been called and invited to her home, he didn’t have the first idea what Lanie looked like. “Hi, I’m Rick.” He’d stopped at a market on the way over and picked up a bouquet of flowers for the hostess, which he then offered.

The woman, in fact a colleague of Lanie’s from the ME’s office, gave him an unabashed once-over, called into the room over her shoulder. “There’s a fine man at your door with flowers, Lanie, and he thinks I’m you. Can I take them?” She came back to Rick. “I’ve never seen you before, but I could definitely get used to it.”

Lanie came strolling up beside his greeter, hip checked her aside without warning.

“You’ll have to excuse her. She doesn’t spend a whole lot of time with the living.” Her friend drew a look and slowly backed away. “You’re Rick. _I’m_ Lanie,” she said and welcomed him with a peck on the cheek, and because she simply couldn’t help herself added, “the picture on your books doesn’t do you justice.”

“Well now, flattery will get you…” He presented his hand for the second time. “Flowers. It’s nice to meet the real you, Lanie. Now that I can see you, I know it was your gorgeous face at the restaurant.”

She hooked an arm around his and led him inside, all of her attendees--of which there were now four--already present, except for Kate, whom she’d asked to make a stop for the limes she’d forgotten to buy earlier in the day.

Introductions went around: Javi, Kevin, and Nora--the flirty colleague--and the name Rick Castle didn’t seem to move the needle on any of them. Had he been of calmer, clearer mind, he might’ve seized the opportunity to roast them for it. As it was, they could’ve mistaken him for James Patterson and he probably would’ve let it slide by.

Under the pretense of preparing him a welcome drink, Lanie pulled him into the kitchen for a tête-à-tête out of earshot.

“Kate’s on her way. She still doesn’t know you’re going to be here. There’s beer or wine or I have some harder stuff. She’s bringing limes.” Rick thanked her for the beer, popped the top, and coated his abruptly dry throat. “I told you a thing about me on the phone. A thing about my girl is that she likes everything to line up nice and neat. That helps her when she’s wearing the badge, not so much when she puts it in the drawer at night, you understand?”

“I think so,” he replied genuinely. “The last thing I want to do is push too hard or scare her away. Obviously, it seems like I’ve already done that.”

“Look, I don’t want to talk for her, but she--”

Just then, Kate came around the corner and stopped dead in her tracks as though she’d walked straight into a wall of glass.

It was Rick she locked eyes with first, and the shock of seeing him there, somewhere there was absolutely no reason she should be seeing him, nearly collapsed her.

“Hey,” Lanie said casually when neither of the two said anything at all. She took the bag of limes Kate had hanging at her side. “I’ll get you one,” she told Kate, absent the need for a verbal request, and promptly filled a glass with more vodka than ice.

“Lanie, what the hell’s going on?” The entire two minutes, she hadn’t broken eye contact with Rick. He’d instantly fallen under the spell she’d cast with her mere presence and stood there absolutely lost in her. “How did you… What are you doing here?”

Lanie’s eyes tracked from one to the other. “I’m just going to go back out there.” She ducked between them, stopped, and glanced back. “Food in fifteen,” she said and got out of there, mainly, given the fire in Kate’s eyes, for her own safety.

“Hi,” Rick said finally when they were alone. Getting such a simple word to leave his mouth had never been a tougher challenge. “You look great.”

She’d arrived in well-cut jeans, boots of black, and a plum-colored sweater that hung off one shoulder, the skin the garment’s generous cut left exposed pale and perfect. He recalled how his lips had explored that unconcealed place, indulged in the sweet taste of it, and he admonished himself the prideful rush, not from the remembrance of the whisper they’d left behind but from her present exhibition, as though it was now for her a piece of art she carried with her for all to see.

“Your cheek is much better,” he observed and fought to keep his fingers from it.

Kate looked away for the first time, down at the floor a breath and back up again. “Rick, I don’t understand what you’re doing here.” Beyond confusion, there was an unmistakable note of anger in her tone--at him, at Lanie, at both.

“I just wanted to talk to you. I didn’t want to leave things the way they were after the other night.”

“So, you ambush me at my best friend’s house?”

“Well, putting it that way seems a little harsh. It wasn’t even my idea. You’re not even the teensiest bit glad to see me?” He held up his fingers, made a cutesy gesture trying to elicit a smile. The effort crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, or so screamed the scowl she slapped him with, though the truth was that part of her anger was with herself for feeling exactly as he hoped.

“No, I’m not,” she insisted through a crack in her voice, and with a fist pressed against her hip like it suggested some firmness the quaver had undermined, she doubled down. “I think you should go.”

That was the moment the remaining embers of Rick’s nerves extinguished, and the fun began.

“Is that right,” he poked, coolly sipped from his bottle of beer.

Kate mimicked his move and swallowed the vodka that remained in her glass, but did so overzealously, causing the ice cubes to smack her in the teeth. Rick bit back a smile, but not without breaking a sweat.

“Yeah, it is,” she pressed on, brushing off the miscue. “I don’t want you here. No one asked me if I wanted you here.”

“Would you like me somewhere else?” His eyes traveled over her. “You can have me anywhere you want.” Her muscles tensed when he shifted closer. “Maybe later. I think I’ll stick around for a while. Everyone knows the party doesn’t really get going until the limes arrive, and whatever’s in the oven smells delicious.” He stepped around her, dipped in for her ear as he passed. “So do you, Detective.”

The rumble sent a flash of heat through her from tip to toe, and it took her a minute to reset, to throw the switch and divert her huff from the Rick track to the Lanie track, and once she did, she went straight for her as she stood away from the rest of the group, huddled in conversation with Javi.

“Can I talk to you for a minute, please? _Alone_.” Her partner grinned goofily, unaware of the tension on account of his intoxication not courtesy of the beer in his hand, but of the one-on-one attention granted by his date, whose company he’d been long hungry for. “Now.”

The pair went down the hall to Lanie’s bedroom and Kate closed them inside, began to pace the floor around the bed. “I don’t even know where to start,” she said and tugged her hair into a fist when she needed to do something with the explosion of excess energy.

“Exactly. That’s why I invited him. Now you don’t have to know. I started for you.”

“Do you think this is funny, Lanie?”

Lanie wandered over to the bed and dropped down onto the edge, crossed her skirted legs. “You don’t need to be acting like the world’s coming to an end is what I think. Get a grip, would you please? It’s not like you were never going to talk to the man again. I just made it sooner rather than later. Lord have mercy, did you get a whiff of him?” Her eyes closed with the heavenly remembrance.

Kate had, but it wasn’t the time for that.

“You don’t know what I was or wasn’t going to do. God, Lanie, I’m not--”

“And what’s the difference if you knew or didn’t know he’d be here, huh? How exactly do you think you would’ve _prepared_ to see him again? He’s a man, not some test you study for. Anyway, it’s just dinner. No one’s asking you to tear his clothes off and do the nasty again.” Slowly her lips curled. “Speaking of,” she said and began to bounce, “my new mattress got delivered yesterday.”

Kate twisted her face and turned away. “I told you to keep me out of your sexcapades with Espo. What a shock, again you don’t listen.”

“Okay, you know what?” Lanie pushed up from the bed and straightened her outfit. “I’m having a dinner party. Parties are fun. This isn’t, so if you want to go, if this is all too much and you can’t find a way to sit and enjoy a nice meal with your friends, then go. I won’t stop you. But he’s only here because he wants to talk to you, Kate. He’s not here to hurt you, and that’s not what I was trying to do, either. I know you know that. He seems like a good man to me, but you do whatever you want.”

“Dammit,” she sighed, and a few steps behind followed Lanie out, stopping first in the kitchen to refill the drink she’d left before rejoining the rest of the group that was now being called to the dining table.

Each of its six settings had a name card placed in front of it, Lanie’s beside Javi’s, of course, likewise Kate’s and Rick’s, with Kevin and Nora anchoring each end. Obvious care was paid to the table’s design, but invitingly so. The extent of formality began and ended with the glass centerpiece arranged with lemons and the matching ivory-colored dinnerware with the black rim, and fine china it was not.

Rick located his seat, peeked at the card beside it and happily found Kate’s name. “Looks like we’re neighbors,” he remarked as she approached, and slid out her chair. “If you ever need to borrow any sugar,” he teased in close when she sat without acknowledgement and stiffly tucked in.

“I guess that makes me the other slice of bread of a Rick sandwich,” Nora his saucy admirer chirped. “Can I be the one on top?” she added with a guffaw and without shame, earning a pop of an eyebrow from Lanie.

“Allow me.” A puffed-up Rick pulled her chair as well before he took his own. “Before I start shoving my face full of this incredible food, a thank you to all,” he announced, “with a special nod to Lanie, for allowing me to crash the evening’s festivities. You’ve saved me from a night alone at home, where I’d planned to wash my hair and eat ice cream straight from the carton.”

Nora, already busy with salad tongs in hand, uttered “Great hair” like no one could hear her.

“So, you and Beckett know each other?” Kevin posed innocently, landing a synchronous affirmation and denial from the two.

“Hey, can I call you Beckett?” Rick followed. The denials continued. “I’ll ask again some other time. To answer your question, Kevin, uh, the detective and I have met once or twice. I think our hostess here has it in her lovely head that we should see more of one another.” He shrugged exaggeratedly so Kate would catch it. “I don’t know. I’m not sure yet.”

Javi snickered, threw in “That’s cold, bro. She’s sitting right there.” Nora sulked over her salad. Kevin didn’t know what to do, so he straightened his napkin that didn’t need straightening.

“The hostess is just trying to get herself some pork roast,” Lanie said. “Pass the meat, Writer-man.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Rick handed the serving dish off to Kate to keep it moving.

“What do you write?” Javi asked. “Not that I read much. I mostly like to sleep and do…other stuff when I’m off the job.” He and Lanie swapped unsubtle glances.

Like she’d been cued, that was when Kate finally injected herself into the chat. “He writes cheesy mystery books,” she said around a forkful. “The ones they’re always trying to get rid of for cheap on clearance racks at airports.”

By Kevin’s face, he was more lost than ever.

“I like romance novels,” Nora muttered.

Rick uncorked a swift retort, one masterfully tied with a wordsmith’s bow. “That’s true. I do.” He tipped back the final sip of his beer, turned to Kate. “You know, I had no idea cops got so much vacation time, Detective. I mean I guess that explains the shelf in your apartment that’s lined with my cheesy airport mystery books.”

Beneath the table, his hand crept up and over the curve of her thigh and squeezed.


	12. Chapter 12

Lanie’s drink almost came shooting out of her nose when she tried to stifle a laugh. Instead, her efforts sent her into a fit of coughing that had her fleeing the table. Javi went off after her, just a step behind.

As nonchalantly as she could, Kate dropped a hand beneath the table and grabbed the skin of the back of Rick’s in a firm pinch. It didn’t take more than a couple of seconds of that discomfort for him to yank it from where it’d settled uninvited on her thigh.

“You’ve been to Beckett’s apartment?” Kevin asked, the query not some mischievous attempt at a “gotcha” as much as a verbal realization of a personal failure. “I’ve never even seen it,” he whined with discernible envy, sounding like a kid who’d never received an invitation to a popular schoolmate’s birthday parties.

Kate rolled her eyes. Kevin was undoubtedly the softer of her two NYPD partners, and for that crown, he required far more work.

“No, Ryan, he hasn’t been to my apartment.” Having smoothly delivered the fib she hoped would route the conversation elsewhere, she slowly swiveled her head Rick’s way, noting the nosy arch of Nora’s brow and the puzzled crimp of his. “He writes _fiction_ , and apparently he has trouble keeping his pen capped when he’s off the clock.”

Rick turned immediately to Nora, a grin curling the corner of his mouth. “I love it when she talks dirty to me,” he wisecracked.

“Someone’s talkin’ dirty?” Javi returned to the table at the tail end of the joke, resumed his seat. “You’re Irish, dude. Aren’t you supposed to be able to hold your booze?” he mocked, assuming straight off it was Kevin making a fool of himself.

Popping a bite of pork, Rick gestured a thumb in Kate’s direction.

“No way. Beckett’s getting after it?” He pushed out a chuckle and Kate slivered her eyes at him.

“Your lipstick’s all over your face, Esposito. You look like a clown,” she snarled and went back to her plate.

Kevin reached out and Javi batted his hand away. “Leave it.” He started wiping furiously at his lips and cheeks with his napkin, all but admitting what he and Lanie had gotten up to in the other room, but there was no lipstick, in fact, none, at all. “Oh, yeah, that’s hilarious. You’re both messed up.”

In their corner of the table, like Statler and Waldorf watching from the balcony, Nora and Rick were thoroughly enjoying the trio’s show. Thankfully for the three, Lanie came back before the heckling could begin.

“Sorry, everybody, something went down the wrong pipe.” She cleared her throat for effect, found Kate across the table and silently checked in. The glare leveled at her came as little surprise. “Okay, I’m definitely going to need another drink. Anyone else while I’m up?”

Rick picked up his bottle and shook it, slid his chair back. “I’ll join you.”

Kate watched them walk off together toward the kitchen, and she didn’t like that at all. They’d already teamed up against her once. That was when Nora leaned in as close as she could. “I don’t know why the hell you wouldn’t, but if you don’t want him, can I have him?”

For Kate, it seemed the nightmare wouldn’t end.

“I’m just saying, whatever house you were in before, I think we’re both in the doghouse now,” Lanie informed Rick as she poured herself a fresh glass. “I don’t know what was up with you two out there, but if you want to talk to her, I suggest you try doing it sooner rather than later. She’s already got one foot out the door, and from the looks of it, she’d probably enjoy giving either of us a swift kick with the other one.”

Rick twisted the cap off the beer she offered, downed several gulps. “I know you and I just met, but has anyone ever told you your pep talks could use some work?” He stole a peek into the other room. “I can’t just go out there and kidnap her from the table. I mean, I could but there’s that whole kicking thing. I happen to be quite fond of my shins.”

“I can see why she’d like you,” Lanie snickered. “And why you’d annoy the crap out of her.”

His swellheaded balloon promptly deflated.

**xxxx**

Poised for opportunity to strike and a moment to seize, Rick had kept an eager eye on Kate since they’d finished with dinner. She’d done well at keeping her distance, despite the small group and the modest surroundings, but he had managed to catch them, the fleeting glance or two she’d shot in his direction. Daggers or desire, truth was he was welcomed either. At least, he thought, it was something.

Eventually she snuck away, headed off in the direction of the bathroom, which was when he politely--and gladly--excused himself from a Kevin-instigated discussion on seasonal allergies, and followed after her, parked himself outside the door in wait.

She emerged after a couple of minutes, startled by his unexpected presence and announcing so by way of a colorful expletive, her heartbeat hastened for more reasons than the obvious one.

“I said nice before, but that wasn’t even close. You look incredible tonight,” he told her when she made a move to pass without any further acknowledgement. It was enough to stop her. “You smell incredible, too.”

Lanie had earlier observed the same about him. Somehow, it’d been easier to shrug off then, when the butter of his voice hadn’t had her tooth tugging at her lip. For fear of it being discovered, she couldn’t bring herself to turn around and face him.

“I still don’t understand why you had to come here, why you couldn’t have just--”

“Just what,” he cut in, “been okay with not seeing you again? Been okay with letting you decide for both of us that what happened the other night was nothing? And Lanie found me, Kate. She called me. I guess she wasn’t okay with it either.” He paused in hopes she’d come around, but she didn’t. “You won’t even look at me? Fine, then give me ten minutes alone, and if you still want me to go after that, I promise I’ll go.”

She couldn’t know it, but behind his back he had his fingers crossed, signaling his intention to do nothing of the sort.

“I’m not doing it here, not with everyone,” Kate reluctantly gave in after a minute of consideration.

Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth and without pausing to inform the rest of them, Rick guided her straight to the front door and out into the hallway. “A walk?” he suggested and earned a shrug, which he realized was as close to a yes as he was going to get. “Don’t get any ideas about pushing me into oncoming traffic,” he admonished when they made their way out of Lanie’s building.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Kate replied more playfully than intended. She was finding it a greater struggle, holding herself at even. “Ten minutes,” she reminded him, firm to the point of sounding put on. And it was more than it wasn’t.

Without a destination, they set off into the cool night air, the crowd at nearly every restaurant and bar they passed spilling out onto the sidewalk, the white noise of the city weaving its way through the buzz of gossip and laughter.

“A writer not knowing what to say happens more often than people think, but that doesn’t make it any easier,” Rick confessed, rendered unexpectedly tongue-tied by the mission at hand that was for him uncharted heart territory. “I guess I should say, first, that I’m sorry. I’m sorry I upset you, that night at your place and again tonight. I think, or I hope you know I’d never set out to do that.”

Just then, a group of rowdy twentysomethings came bouncing toward them, each of its male members shirtless, one wearing a sash emblazoned “Groom to Be” and an uncertain smile. “You should marry that chick instead,” one of the future groom’s buddies cackled, speaking of Kate. “She’s way hotter than Lucy.”

“Poor Lucy,” Rick sympathized through a smile as the cohort continued along its raucous path. “It’s true.”

Kate shook her head, amused by both. “Shut up.”

He immediately flipped his wrist, shifted aside his sleeve. “Nope, sorry, still got eight minutes on the clock.” Wasting none of it, when they reached the entryway of a closed shop they could step into just ahead, he pulled her in, found his words. “I meant what I wrote in that note, Kate. Something happened when I first saw you--before Lady Raven and the rest of it--and nothing has ever felt like that for me before. To call it attraction wouldn’t be enough. To call it love would be too much. I know that. Whatever it is, it’s a different and a new I want to live in with you.

“And maybe what got us here wasn’t all part of some grand scheme of the universe to bring two people together. I happen to be someone who thinks it would be pretty cool if it were. I think believing in things like magic and superstition and aliens and wishing on stars makes life more fun.

“But even if it was all just a bunch of coincidences, if it turned out I just picked a shitty day to drive my Ferrari, and I just have a thing for mediocre New York pizza and arcade games, it wouldn’t make any difference. One or the other, it wouldn’t change how I feel, Kate, about you or about you and me. And, yes, I do think there could and should be a you and me, despite that drunk, half naked guy’s suggestion that you should be betrothed to another.”

If that was him not knowing what to say, Kate thought, anything that came out of her mouth in reply would surely amount to little more than gibberish, so she spared them both.

“We’re different, Rick. We live different lives. I need…time to think.”

Rick reached out and cupped her cheek without a second thought, softly smiled in the shadows. “Okay,” he said, both understanding it and hating it equally. “You can even have the rest of mine.” He took his hand away, checked his watch for the second time. “It’s not much, but it’s yours. Should we head back? Nora’s probably wondering where I am.”

They merged back into the flow of the Saturday night lot, their arms gently brushing against one another as they walked, passing by the same crowds, serenaded by the same song of the city. The entire way, Kate hoped to feel his hand wrap around hers. Rick hoped the same of hers, but it wasn’t hope either needed.

Back at the apartment, everyone was again seated at the table, this time for dessert and coffee, and all heads turned when the pair walked through the door after they’d gone off together so abruptly.

“Where the hell did you two go?” Javi spoke up first for the group.

Kevin shoveled another bite of pie into his mouth. “Yeah, we were thinking about calling the cops.” Nora threw him a pity laugh when no one else did. “There’s pie,” he announced with a nip of bitterness.

Lanie, knowing but appropriately discreet, directed them to the kitchen. “Grab some plates. There’s coffee in there, too. If you want tea, the water in the kettle should still be hot from mine.”

The galley-style kitchen was comfortable enough for two people to occupy, but that didn’t leave much room to maneuver, certainly not without involving a bit of dancing. Kate--of course, familiar--knew where things were kept. She knew what cabinet the mugs were in, which canister on the counter held the tea bags, where the spoons were, and she quickly took charge.

“Coffee or tea?” Rick asked, wanting to help.

Busy carving out two slices of the French silk pie, she flicked her chin in the direction of the three ceramic canisters against the wall. “The big one. It doesn’t matter what kind,” she told him of the several varieties of tea it held. 

He dug his fingers in like it was a game, swirled them around and plucked two at random, passed behind her, close, to get to the stove. “I’ll have some, too,” he dropped over her bare shoulder, and the warm breath of him tickled her skin.

With the envelopes unfolded, he poured from the kettle. Licking a wayward dollop of chocolate from her knuckle, Kate watched his hands at work, inexplicably entranced by a practice she herself engaged in without any consideration nearly every night.

“Do you want me to put anything in it?”

It took a few seconds for her to process the question and then a few more to peel her eyes from his lips where they’d inadvertently landed.

“Um, there’s--up in this one, there’s honey,” she told him and then they both reached at the same time, his hand blanketing hers on the cabinet’s handle.

Next thing they knew, their mouths met in an urgent, hungry kiss, with his fingers tangled in her hair and her leg sliding up his thigh. Forgetting she was still holding it, the metal pie server fell to the floor with an echoey clang, which should’ve, at the very least, provoked a pause, but it didn’t. No, that required the intervention of a curious Lanie who came innocently walking in from the other room to find out what’d happened.

“You’re serious. In my kitchen.” She stood with one hip cocked and her arms crossed, waited, cleared her throat when none of that was enough.

“Lanie,” Kate said and gripped the edge of the counter to regain her balance.

“Kevin’s head would’ve exploded if he’d seen that. You’re lucky it’s Lanie.” She spotted the utensil on the floor, the specks of chocolate and flakes of crust it lay amongst. “What, you can’t get your thrill on without trashing my pretty, white kitchen? How about you take yourselves home and have at it there. If the first time was half as hot as that was, you sure have my damn blessing.”

Rick waited until Lanie walked out, backed Kate up against the sink and locked her there, an arm at her each side.

“I must say, your best friend has some excellent ideas.” He pressed his lips against her neck. “What do you say, Detective? Do you want to take me home or do you need some more time to think?”

She was practically halfway there before he even finished asking.


	13. Chapter 13

Kate hadn’t even managed to get her key into the lock of her apartment door before Rick came for her mouth, backing her against the wall at the end of the hallway and melting into her body when it calmed from the unexpected advance and welcomed him.

The cab ride from Lanie’s place had been a test both torturous and titillating, one of will that each, at one point or another, had nearly failed across its just 17-minute stretch through Saturday night traffic. But now there were no prying eyes in a rearview mirror to hold them in check, no kitchen utensils, or intruding hostesses to betray their lust. It was only the two of them, and the lonely bed that awaited.

“If this is the kind of thinking you meant, you can do as much of it as you want.” His teeth grazed her shoulder, took aim at her earlobe, and sparked a shiver that only intensified when he whispered into her ear. “You taste even more incredible than you smell.”

Kate closed his hair in a fist, tugged him gently back. “We should go inside,” she urged, silently cursing the necessity. Another minute of the business his fingers were transacting beneath her sweater and she might well have forgotten where she lived.

On the safer side of the door, Rick tore off his jacket and tossed it aside. “C’mere,” he said but met her halfway, lifting her off the floor with his embrace, encouraging her legs open and around his waist. “Can I…?”

She understood his wish without need of the words, brushed his lips with the answer, and he spun them around, carried her off for the bedroom he already knew so well, all the way reciprocating her pepper of kisses with equal frolic.

The lamp there beside the bed had been left on, its light soft and warm, as days before, and that gifted him the exquisite pleasure of watching without restriction as she began to undress.

“You don’t need to wait for my permission,” Kate informed humorously when he made no move to do the same, though her deadpan delivery masked it well.

Captivated, Rick pushed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans, continued to feast on the sight of her skin as she slowly revealed more and more of it.

“I know it’s only been a week, but I missed you. I did. I missed your smile and your laugh and kissing you, touching you.” He closed their distance by half, went on when it seemed his candor had left her searching for her voice. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say it. I know you missed me, too. In case no one’s ever told you, your eyes give you away.” For both, it was instantly as though he’d positioned the final piece of a puzzle into place, a puzzle they’d each built separately, shared unknowingly.

Lady Raven’s parting words.

Kate stood there, unmoving, likewise struck by the bolt, feeling exposed not only by her physical lack of covering, but also by her body’s unfaithfulness to her secret and Rick’s recognition of it. And it wasn’t just that some kooky clairvoyant had ambiguously hinted at the vulnerability. He had also, in the brief moments of their long-ago first encounter inside that bookstore that she hadn’t yet brought herself to recollect for him. Maybe she never would.

Close enough to touch her, though the pale pink camisole she’d worn beneath her sweater stood in its way, he traced a delicate finger along the path that so bewitched him, down across her heart and between her breasts.

“I missed all the parts, but I especially missed this one.”

Kate placed her hand over his, held it in place there. It wasn’t her eyes alone. His told a story as eloquent as those he penned to page, but looking now, she could see in them a story written only for her.

Immersed in its pages, she found his belt and freed it from its buckle, set to work on the buttons of his shirt. He slipped her out of the silk without challenge, guided her backward to the bed and climbed on after her, nestled between her legs.

“Rick, I--”

He relieved her of the thought with a kiss when her tone suggested the weight of it. “Not now,” he said and feathered a hand over her skin, eased her willing thigh aside. “Not now.”

**xxxx**

“I want to explain why,” Kate announced into the quiet light apropos of nothing. Naked and satiated, her body lay stretched long atop his, her chin propped up by one hand, the other swirling lazy circles on his chest. “Why I asked you to leave that night, after…”

Rick popped open his eyes that’d been shut but a moment. “I think you mean told, Detective. _Told_ me to leave.” He stroked a tender trail across her shoulder blades. “Even so, generous as I am, I’m willing to accept that very hearty and very thorough apology you just gave me. I’ll even throw in a thank you because I’m such a forgiving guy. Okay, okay, tell me, I’m listening,” he blurted when she countered his repartee with a pinch.

“I don’t let many people in, Rick,” she confessed after a pause, “and I don’t give a lot of myself away. It might not seem that way after how fast all of this has been, and part of the reason I needed you to go was because of that, because I scared myself. I mean, I hardly knew you and you were here in my apartment and in my bed. How much I wanted that and wanted you scared me. It was like it suddenly hit me that I’d sabotaged all the work I’d done.”

“What work, not to feel something? Feel something good? Kate, you and I may not have years together behind us, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be the one to break this news to you with a reasonable amount of certainty: A heart like yours can’t just be locked away behind some door. It’s too big for any room to hold it. That’s why it feels like work and why, no matter how much you try, you’ll never be able to stop it.”

Kate lowered her forehead, rested it against his chest and pressed her lips there. “I think I might’ve liked you better when you were just some pretty face on a book jacket.”

“It is a damn fine face. I can’t argue with that,” he joked then lifted her chin with his knuckle, cupped her healing cheek. “Only one of us is art.”

She kissed him for that, for that and many things.

“The day you wrote me the note…” She stopped herself, hearing how crazy what she was about to admit sounded in her head. How crazy it was. “God, this is--I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”

“We could take a break and go back to” --he waggled his eyebrows-- “not talking if you want. I still have a few moves in my back pocket that you haven’t seen yet. Trust me, you’ll want to see them. Many, many times.”

Kate smiled nervously.

“Rick, everything Lady Raven told you, she told me, too.” By his expression, it didn’t register at all. “Lanie thought me going to a psychic would be fun or funny or helpful or…I don’t know what she thought. She made the appointment. I knew nothing about it until that afternoon. If I had, I never would’ve agreed to it.”

Rick nearly rolled her over the edge of the bed when he pushed himself upright.

“Let me--I need to make sure I’m getting this right, because my brain is definitely running in sex-hangover mode. You’re saying you went to a psychic, just a couple of days before I did, and of all the psychics that must work in this city, it was the same psychic I went to?”

Kate wrapped the mess of sheets and blankets up around her shoulders. A part of her desperately wished she could shove the cork back into the bottle, erase the previous minute from existence altogether. The other part of her--the part that was falling so damn hard for him so damn fast--was warmed by his endearing awe.

Like he’d been woken by a bucket of cold water to the face, it all abruptly hit. “Wait, what do you mean everything she told me?”

She swallowed a laugh. If he could’ve seen his face, he would’ve understood how difficult that was.

She mocked Lady Raven using a goofy voice. “‘Come with me to your future, Kate.’ Lanie should’ve paid her in Monopoly money.” When she looked up, Rick’s brow was hoisted halfway up his forehead. “Okay, the woman only said three words to me in the ten minutes I was in that closet she called an office.” She rolled her eyes, watched his grow wider and wider as she revealed what they were. “Sound familiar?”

Rick slowly scanned the bedroom, from one side clear to the other. “There are hidden cameras in here, right? I’m being recorded. This is all a prank cooked up by my publisher ex-wife because she’s pissed at me for killing off Storm?”

Just like that, it was Kate’s turn for a swim in the shock pool.

“You’re killing Derrick Storm? What? Why?”

“Oh, don’t even try to change the subject, Beckett. We’re not even close to done with your thing, and yes I did just call you Beckett because I like it and I’m going to do it more times so you’d better just get used to it.”

Without a warning, Kate rocked forward and kissed him, brief but passionate. “I like it, too,” she said and with a nuzzle of her lips soothed away the sting they’d just rendered. “And there is no prank. Cameras we can talk about after I’ve seen these other moves of yours.”

“Busy later?” he quipped and welcomed her back into his body, his arm curled around her, her head tucked against his shoulder.

“I still don’t know what any of it’s supposed to mean, Rick, or if it’s supposed to mean anything, and I’m sorry but I don’t know what to believe, not yet. I only know that doing what I do every day, people don’t surprise me very often anymore.” She caressed the line of his jaw. “You surprised me.” She waited a beat. “I mean, believe in aliens? Are you serious?”

“And here I thought you were getting mushy on me, which, incidentally, I quite enjoyed.” He lifted his chin into the air, peered down at her from the corner of his eye. “Just for that, I might not put out after our date later.”

Kate raised her mouth to his neck, teased it with her tongue. “Yeah, you will,” she grinned and then quickly pivoted back. “Hey…Derrick Storm. Are you really killing him off?”

“You’re such a fan,” he whispered smugly. “I am, and my ex-wife hates it, which makes me love the idea even more. You shouldn’t think less of me for that, by the way. I can play you some of her voicemails. I’ve actually been wondering if she should be the writer. She’s come up with a pretty creative list of things she thinks I should stick places.”

Kate giggled.

“It’s time,” he said, more solemn. “It’s been time for a while. It’s just not always easy to move when you’re comfortable.” He hugged her in closer, kissed her forehead. “Kind of like right now.”

“Yeah,” she agreed thoughtfully. “So, what will you do? What will you write about?”

“I have a few ideas kicking around this pretty head of mine. Maybe I’ll give one of those a try. Or, better yet, maybe I’ll write about an insanely gorgeous, no-nonsense, sexy, badass, NYPD detective who, thanks to the benevolent universe, crosses paths with an insanely gorgeous, no-nonsense, sexy, badass writer who finds a way to convince her aliens and fate exist and spends the rest of his life proving to her he’s the best surprise she’ll ever know.”

It was supposed to be a joke, but then, maybe it wasn’t.

Kate pulled back, cocked an eyebrow. “Not straying from fiction, I guess.”

“Now, there, that’s wisecrack number two. If I were you, Beckett, I’d proceed with caution. Keep going and I might just decide not to show you all the magical things this tongue can do.”

On all fours, she leaned in for his ear. “No, you won’t, _Castle_ ,” she contended cheekily, gave him a peck on the lips. “Stay. We’re not done here yet. I’ll be right back,” she said and tiptoed off to the bathroom.

As soon as he heard the click of the door, Rick dove to the end of the bed, dug through the pile of their clothes on the floor and found his phone. Opening his list of text messages, he tapped on Gina’s name and speedily typed: “Can’t talk now, but I’ve had a vision, Gina, seen my literary future, and Storm has definitely passed.”

**XXX**

_“My whole life has been pledged to this meeting with you…”_ A. Pushkin

  
  



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